Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through - T. Fleischmann - annotations
2024-12-02 11:07 | Page No.: 19
And there is maybe something joyous in that flight, even though it so often begins in terror, from the epidemics of sexual violence and suicide andsilence that live in this country’s hometowns—something joyous in survival.
2024-12-02 11:08 | Page No.: 19
We are both interested in the things that we came too late for, which means we’re going to have to do them ourselves. I talk about Samuel Delany, chattering on about how he loves dirty, bit fingernails and about Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, where he describes the shuttering of porn theaters in Manhattan as a blow to gay culture, setting liberation back decades.
2024-12-02 11:09 | Page No.: 20
I sought the hookup for its straightforward, just-the-dicks-ma’am nature,
2024-12-02 11:10 | Page No.: 20
So the gay men sexual walking tour of Manhattan has this additional challenge, thatI must avoid metaphors even as I seek to experience an echo of the city’s past.
2024-12-14 13:09 | Page No.: 20
so I’m sweaty and hurrying to go relax. I walk quickly to pass this group on the sidewalk, five adults and akid maybe four years old or so, although I’m bad at figuring out how old children are. As I walk by, the kid turns to me and says, “Hey, are you a girl?” and I smile and I say, “No,” and then the kid says, “Are you a boy?” and I smile and I say, “No,” and then the kid seems to think very carefully and says, “So you don’t haveto be a boy or a girl?” and I say, “That’s right, you got it, youdon’t,” and I smile again but start walking even more quickly because there are five adults with this kid and a lot of adults don’t want you to tell their kid to be a transsexual.
What matters though is that as I am walking ahead more quickly thekid yells out after me, “Hey! I live in a house with a door!” Thekid says it with a lot of confidence and a lot of happiness, really wanting me to know this. And I turn around and say, “Hey, me too!” and we both laugh and then I walk down the block.
Isn’t that so beautiful? “Hey, I live in a house with a door.” I’mhungry for truth and kids are just spouting facts up and down thestreet.
2024-12-02 11:12 | Page No.: 21
I’m probably missing the whole message, which is just, “Hey, I live in a house with a door.” And really, she reminds me, isn’t some information about being alive beautiful enough? That we dry forks and touch hair and throw away a sock?
2024-12-06 08:46 | Page No.: 30
Instead what I’m really writing is a love letter to prose, a book that is slutty about it. Like how pleasure, written into the structural, open field of prose, is so lively—the first descriptions of green life and friendship in Century of Clouds, a pestle and mortar in Zami.
2024-12-06 16:29 | Page No.: 31
It is difficult to recall what that total, exhaustive feeling of not knowing feels like now, but it is the feeling I had both in watching the collapse of the hotel and in first wrapping my hand around someoneelse’s cock.
2024-12-06 16:30 | Page No.: 32
cat’s brain and listens to what it experiences as the cat runs through a field, mice in the distance, becoming “more cat” in the process. At its end, she explains that she has remapped the sensualityof her body,
【Annotation】lo l
2024-12-06 16:31 | Page No.: 32
just that I was driven again and again to type in phrases like bras off—not exactly pornographic, and vaguely autobiographical.
2024-12-06 16:32 | Page No.: 32
I don’t know what it means to name myself when young, or to search from my mother’s living room for bodies in neighboring towns with a tap, tap. But I do know what it means to be unfixed from narrative, anunfixing that feels something like claiming power. I feel grateful for it, really. It meant that I traveled through space as a hotel burned.
2024-12-06 16:33 | Page No.: 33
where I’mnaked and then tired and then on a bus. Everything I do is a weird pocket of experience, balanced with other weird pockets,
2024-12-06 16:40 | Page No.: 33
People sometimes think there’s sadness to my romances because I prioritize long-distance relationships and relationships with people who are already in love with someone else. As Jackson not only lives in Australia but also has there an Australian
2024-12-06 16:40 | Page No.: 33
Long-distance is maybe misleading because it’s not distance (linear) so much as space (four-dimensional) that matters. When my ex-girlfriend or Simon or my ex-boyfriend played the game of exchanging visits with me, it was not as though there were a long linebetween, connecting us through distance, but rather we were the two endpoints of a hypotenuse and about us spun a sphere through which we could exalt and retreat.
2024-12-08 10:25 | Page No.: 34
It is when life is blown into you and so you breathe,
but also it is all the things of imagination and materiality thatmake us, the seamless union of our consciousness and ourunconscious, into an I.
2024-12-08 12:27 | Page No.: 36
The best version of me isn’t the person who falls in love, butthe person who takes love squarely for what it is,
as an occasion to know someone else, to learn about theirdesires, to be each a better self together,
so long as that is what we both want.
To hell with all that hurt, whatever came before.
We can have a love where we are both happy, in which we seeourselves for who we are—
standing there, where any story might begin.
2024-12-08 12:30 | Page No.: 36
“Once we believe that there is no God, that there is no afterlife,then life becomes a very positive statement.
It becomes a very political position because, then, we have nochoice but to work harder to make this place the best place ever.
There is only one chance, and this is it.
If you fuck it up this time, you’ve fucked up forever and ever,”Gonzalez-Torres said.
2024-12-08 12:32 | Page No.: 37
So many stories, taking flight from crags and sinking intothe floorboards, broken and held in the box of the language
2024-12-08 12:33 | Page No.: 37
I’ve learned.
2024-12-08 12:34 | Page No.: 37
I take pills to soften me, I paint myself with a bleached purplehere and there, I inhale smoke into my hollows.
And it remains unpleasant, sometimes, to see this beautifulperson, who knows so well more violence is coming,
that it’s right out the door.
【Annotation】more violence?
2024-09-06 02:52 | Page No.: 41
putting them back into bottles. Categorization isn’t how we acknowledge difference, but rather its enforcement, difference leveraged to keep things apart that could well be together.
2024-09-06 02:57 | Page No.: 43
In a 1992 letter to his gallerist, Gonzalez-Torres reflected on another one of his takeaway pieces, a stack from which you can take an“uninscribed piece of paper,” which he called “Untitled” (Passport). In the letter, he considers the blank paper a source of beautiful possibility, “an untouched feeling.” In the same breath of thought, heoffers that this paper, once it is taken from the stack, should be inscribed with “the most painful, the most banal” as well as “the mostsublime.” It’s a dream where anyone can just walk up and take a passport, which is, yes, sublime, like love—and then we take that paper back out into the world, where passports are denied and seized, love severed in the process. As in an interview with Tim Rollins:
FGT: There is also, of course, Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin and a movie by Sara Gómez called One Way or Another, whichis a feminist view of the Cuban revolution, Santeria, and other issues. This movie is very interesting because it’s also about themeaning of love during a particular historical period. I saw thatmovie the same week that I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour.
TR: That’s a great movie about love.
FGT: No, it’s about meaning and how meaning is dependent on the context.
2024-09-06 02:58 | Page No.: 44
At first it was simply love me, and my mother used to say it made her sad whenever she saw it, and then I added go away, and she said, “Now that makes me even sadder,” and never broughtit up again.
2024-12-12 13:39 | Page No.: 46
I think because of all the transit. Being vulnerable to other people’s hands and voices twice a day makes me want to think about what is inside a moment, which poems are good at doing.
2024-12-12 13:41 | Page No.: 47
Lots of people actually do have healthy and long-lasting and joyful relationships after doing these thirty-six love questions, which makes it seem like we’re all boring, horrible creatures who would get along fine if we just shared some information about our lives with one another, but who refuse to.
2024-12-12 13:42 | Page No.: 47
I read Etel Adnan’s two-volume selected works, To Lookat the Sea Is to Become What One Is,
2024-12-12 13:42 | Page No.: 47
I put my blazer back on and we go to the park where we stare into each other’s eyes (their eyes are beautiful) and then decide we are not in love.
2024-12-12 13:44 | Page No.: 48
The way people react, I know that they are thinking about what they would call my gender and, in the way most people find gender and bodies to be irreducibly the same, that they are thinking also of my body, the small weight of my breasts maybe visible in a sweater.
2024-12-12 13:46 | Page No.: 48
It is as though the institutional architectures of buildings and policies are forcing me to talk about language, about pronouns and bathroom signs, which are not things that I care to talk about.
2024-12-12 13:47 | Page No.: 48
I can see we are all scared by what we aren’t saying.
2024-12-12 13:49 | Page No.: 50
A genderless holy entity now inhabited this body—the Publick Universal Friend, they declared their new name. As the Universal Friend of Friends describes it, the archangels
2024-12-12 13:50 | Page No.: 50
putting their trumpets to their mouth, proclaimed saying, Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory forThee and for everyone, that there is one more call for,
2024-12-12 13:50 | Page No.: 50
that the eleventh hour is not yet past with them, and the day of grace is not yet over with them.
2024-12-12 13:50 | Page No.: 50
Later, the All-Friend’s brother told them that, in the fever, they had declared simply, “There is Room Enough.”
2024-12-12 13:52 | Page No.: 51
Fearful of the darkness, people lit candles at noon, and manyprayed. The Friend, however, saw this dark sky and recognized it as exactly what they had predicted, as an apocalypse coming,albeit six weeks late.
2024-12-12 13:52 | Page No.: 51
The All-Friend, for instance, visited Philadelphia with six companions for the first time shortly after the end ofthe Revolutionary War, where they struggled to find lodging, turned away because of their strangely gendered attire.
2024-12-12 13:53 | Page No.: 51
They “appeared beautifully erect,” one man noted, while the Marquis de Chastellux, coming across some of the Friend’s followers in Philadelphia, was struck by the “young men … with large round flapped hats, and long flowing strait locks, with a sort of melancholy wildness in their countenances, and an effeminate, dejected air.” Who were these strange people, who call their leader “he”? And who was this preacher, so strikingly beautiful, and with a voice that sounded like a “croak”?
2024-12-12 13:53 | Page No.: 51
largely stolen and repurposed from the Quakers who had raised and then disowned them.
2024-12-12 13:54 | Page No.: 52
the number of Deluded Creatures
【Annotation】Deluded Creatures
2024-12-12 13:55 | Page No.: 52
But word preceded them most anywhere, critics with anonymous names like “VOX POPULI” and “Z” writing to local newspapers to decry the sinful preacher.
2024-12-12 13:56 | Page No.: 52
Some of the mothers adopted the Friend to all Mankind’smanner of dress (hair down like a man, unadorned and flowing robes), obeying the demands of plain speech,
2024-12-12 13:59 | Page No.: 53
After the war, vengefulof what he saw as a betrayal and seeking land, George Washington sent Major General John Sullivan (that former commander from Rhode Island) with roughly one quarter of the Continental Army to wreak devastation on the Haudenosaunee. Begun in 1779 and finished in 1780, the Sullivan Expedition wasone of many horrors, the burning of homes and crops and the destruction of any locatable resources, up the Susquehanna River to the Great Lakes, with the majority of the indigenous people driven north and west as refugees.
2024-12-12 14:00 | Page No.: 53
Still, were the Haudenosaunee to offer peace, Washington instructed, they should receive only “terror,” and Sullivan’s men continuedon, writing in their journals of the beauty of the homes and orchards they destroyed.
2024-12-13 13:45 | Page No.: 58
If I am adding myself tothe crowd of people who write, I would like it sometimes to be mewhen I am warm. I would like people to know that I am happy, sometimes.
2024-12-13 13:45 | Page No.: 58
I would like to know: Can this offer something? To someone who is not me?
2024-12-13 13:46 | Page No.: 59
The thing about the lake freezing is that I don’t have any idea what its system is. It’s not that it just freezes when it’s cold enough, because sometimes it is surprisingly warm and the lake freezes, and sometimes it has been bitterly goddamn cold for days and the lake is liquid.
2024-12-13 13:49 | Page No.: 59
He doesn’t manipulate the pictures digitally but instead creates images that suggest a false past of digital manipulation. This is done lo-fi, just mirrors, lights, strings, all in multitudes, all reflections of suspensions of reflections of glow. A giant rectangular mirrored tube with orange flowers like a lipstick, engorging out of its top, and the mirrors reflecting the grass andbugs and trees around it, and some sky. Or a cave, its first cavern illuminated pink and its outer edges electrically blue by the lights Benjy casts, and the pond outside it electrically blue, too, all to frame a neon sign reading Soft Butch in pink-and-blue cursive.
【Annotation】i should stage photographs.
2024-12-13 13:50 | Page No.: 59
There is no way to know from the image that it was such a cold day.
【Annotation】edit Xxxx video, make website. background: Xxxx blue. drop-shadow: light blue. qr code on transparency.
2024-12-14 10:22 | Page No.: 62
The epistolary or the journal, I try to have each at once.
【Annotation】different ?
2024-12-14 10:23 | Page No.: 63
The distinction is between narrative and something else, between the way a town looks in a photograph and the way a town looks whenyou play flashlight tag in it and you are nervous. Sometimes it takes so much momentum to escape your context that you seem to never stop straining at escape after that. Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won’t be enough because you won’t know who you are, when you are someone who isn’t alone.
2024-12-14 11:49 | Page No.: 65
Or perhaps some of the water he included, along with theserelocations, in a 1993 version of his portrait,
a recurrent piece that lists autobiographical phrases with years—
1964 Dad bought me a set of watercolors and gave me my first cat,and
1991
2024-12-14 11:50 | Page No.: 65
His personal correspondences are also wet with the stuff.
“Never thought that a natural element, such as the falls would
generate such an incredible array of fetishisms,
Niagara cups, belts, lanyards, key holders, etc.”
he wrote to a friend after viewing the Falls.
“Well it was OK,”
Ross added to the note,
“but they weren’t as big as I thought they would be …”
Or maybe, like his autobiography, the water is just that—
waves of itself, lapping body and land.
Sung, inside a body again.
And then a body, singing of land and water.
2024-12-18 09:39 | Page No.: 69
I know how painful it is to be defined by something so large
that it seems to swallow every bit of who you are.
That’s why feeling joy is so revolutionary.
So that later, when I feel like I am a memory, all alone in themoonlight,
2024-12-22 13:31 | Page No.: 78
My dips and splays are like I am reaching so far that I bend.
You might think they lack grace, these moves, but that is onlybecause I like to dance alone,
the grace of my movement known just to me.
2024-12-22 13:32 | Page No.: 78
Sometimes the arms go up, and then they go back down.
The piece first went on display in 1991, as part of the show
Every Week There Is Something Different.
The performance begins and ends when the dancer is on andthen off the platform, but again, most of the time the platformis empty.
It is a blue square rimmed by light bulbs, and the audienceleaves the room knowing it to be just and only that.
2024-12-22 13:40 | Page No.: 80
but mainly, I miss the love faggots share together,
a kind of soft and hard friendship that endures.
You find out that everything means something different,
when you’re a faggot.
You learn that you are lovable after all,
and that once you are done being lovable, you will be readyto love again.
2024-12-22 13:43 | Page No.: 82
Finally, at a house party that is a fund-raiser for a community bail bond, someone clues me in that it’s my testosterone blockers, something about the way theyhave accumulated in my body, that have done this. Which is ridiculous, because the pills make me feel like I need a drink, actually, to deal with all the bullshit that comes with them.
2024-12-22 13:43 | Page No.: 82
There are all these mysteries to a body. Why, or how. This sense that I’m an experiment, that I am coming together. That I need someone else to tell me about me. Within the parameters of myself,it has always been what is unknown, actually, that most bleeds into my other dimensions. That is present.
2024-12-22 13:49 | Page No.: 84
I don’t really play with my trauma in sex, just sometimes with control a little bit.
2024-12-22 13:49 | Page No.: 84
I did convince myself that I should, though, for a while, like how I thought I had to bottom for years. I really believed I would fail my radical queer ethics if I didn’t shove stuff up my butt.
2025-01-11 16:28 | Page No.: 88
And I do my best to join that work as a person who has taken the time to heal, because you help other people better once you’ve helped yourself. This is back in our apartment, Jackson teaching meto put my feet flat on the ground and to breathe and to identify where my strength is inside of me. Healing includes talking and crying, until I feel like I understand what has happened and what it means to me, and sometimes I talk about things from a long timeago, and sometimes from now. Jackson draws from his practice as abody worker, and sometimes I sit and I think of all the people who have survived who I did not think were going to survive, and
2025-01-11 16:28 | Page No.: 88
then I think of myself alive. Some nights we gather all the houseplants and put them in the bathroom, then we run the shower all the way up to get everything steamy and light candles, and then we run a hot bath and sit in it together, what Jackson calls a Jurassic Sauna, with a Sade album on. And after that I eat some homemade kraut out of a stone crock, and then I’m ready to be a person doing something, and to think about what I’m doing, and whoI’m doing it with.
2025-01-10 22:51 | Page No.: 89
They’re like that other text portrait, the typed-out one, but without years listed alongside the phrases.
【Annotation】look into FGT text portrait
2025-01-10 22:51 | Page No.: 90
My own video is pretty awful to revisit because I hate listening to my voice,
2025-01-10 22:52 | Page No.: 90
I say “like” during a view to remember, a simple ocean, a bounced check, and a wet lick on his face, and Cyd “ums” and “yeahs” during a wet lick on his face and many possible landscapes, and then during a possible landscape.
2025-01-10 22:53 | Page No.: 90
I’m not sure how my voice today sounds in relation to the faggy, nasally pep my Midwest youth gifted me. It doesn’t feel like there were any choices in it, or maybe, rather, the choice was to tune it on the page, where I can hear what I’m saying without the sound getting in the way.
【Annotation】:')
2025-01-11 13:44 | Page No.: 92
Is not quiet but is loud and is not a color butis several colors at once. Is not vulnerable nor dangerous, but might be one day a flood after sunlight, or a weight so heavy it moves itself, and carves smaller the earth
2025-01-11 13:45 | Page No.: 95
… fracture. Split through, split apart, split into and out of blue.
Notes
2025-01-11 13:46 | Page No.: 97
I don’t want to claim any expertise on the artist, and hope to engage with his work horizontally—if anything, opening up space forfurther meaning rather than exerting any sort of authority. But itreally helped me to think—encountering his work did—and I am appreciative of that, and hope to share some of it.
【Annotation】about FGT
2025-01-11 13:47 | Page No.: 98
Page 39: The quote from Agnes Martin appears in a 1976 interview with John Gruen, collected in The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists (A Capella, 1991).
2025-01-11 13:47 | Page No.: 98
Page 71: I primarily used two books to gather information about Publick, The Public Universal Friend by Paul B. Moyer (Cornell University Press, 2015) and Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey Jr. (also Cornell, 1964). I am also appreciative of Scott Larson’s “Indescribable Being” in the journal Early American Studies (fall 2014), which was the first thing I read about
2025-01-11 13:48 | Page No.: 98
Publick that understood their gender, and also the first writing that meaningfully engaged them as a settler.