As proprioception does not come from a singular or specific organ within the body, but from a sort of strange collective (the nervous system), this account will be necessarily fragmented—parts pouring from parts:

There was a time when I lived alone in the desert amongst many versions of cacti. There were cacti there, and there was heat. Cacti exhibit numerous types of adaptations (for the purpose of their conserving water in hot conditions (because cacti are in a constant state of drought)). Because cacti have spines (as opposed to leaves, leaves which over time have become in some ways, extinct due to context and environment) they have a sort of evolved protection on/ as their forms. Areoles (which are what (on cacti) tubular flowers bloom from) relate directly to the spines on cacti. So, the bloom relates to the prick.

For me, to go from a contextual solitude (because we, as human beings, move at differing paces it sometimes makes collaboration of even a moment, difficult or strained—in other words, I often find myself alone in the work of writing) to a collaborated setting, is a profound, yet jerking motion; a torque.  Such a torque was a bit of what I felt when I knowingly (by my agency) went into public hypnosis during Melissa Buzzeo’s offering at Naropa’s Violence and Community Symposium 2012. Buzzeo’s offering stated itself as hypnosis inducing so that those who did not wish to undergo such hypnosis could choose out of it. As with the cacti, slowly evolving toward what it is that might protect them, hypnosis is not something I would ever turn away from. I need to become this, even if by tension.

There, mid-hypnosis, as I began to drift amidst repeated phrases (“you are safe here”) as well as at times, jarringly divergent (from repetition) phrases (“you took the words from my body before I could write them” / “go back to the mirror at your solar plexus, the mirror which reflects everyone else’s mirror”) I experienced myself coming up into and through a very odd quality of light and air. This light was not particularly visual. It was more like a stimulation of a sort of body ease. Looseness? Yes, a saturate loosening. The sensation of that place of loosening was a lot like the space just before sleep (when it is possible to inhabit that place without being overwrought with visitations by specific images or the anxiety-based feeling that one is about to fall down some very steep stairs). What is it for a tightly threaded cactus, carefully and deliberately doula-ing its own ongoing relation to water regardless of what is happening (heat) exterior to it, to be knowingly (but without sufficient skill) placed in the center of a thick deluge? Of a feral desert storm?

I do not doubt that it is the way that we inhabit (which effects encounter) what it is that we experience, that ultimately shapes how we come through that experience. I am saying that I know that the non-visual body ease toward loosening was both a result of my engagement with the hypnosis offering, and a result of Buzzeo’s reoccurring and stabbing chant swirls—so, a collaboration. A co-created soak.

There are times when the richnesses of a deluge, create momentary sensation for me—but so, in ways wherein all of the saturateness of that soak, cannot be integrated fast enough, so some of it runs off, drains down the spines and areole tubes, lost. There is grief in what falls off of the form for me. There always has been. If wetness is what I hold (by evolutionary design/ volition) in my center, then of course loss of wetness because I cannot integrate it (by design/ volition) rapidly enough, is painful.

Due to this it is often the case that I benefit intensely from after-the-fact processing time re these types of inebriations. I find that if I don’t have that processing time I am left with a quality of alexia in the overlap of my psyche/ physicality. In other words, without the ability to process what falls away (as a way to possibly integrate it during that processing time as ‘other than loss’) I end up feeling even more of a lacunae-based clench in my form (see the cactus getting drier, even though just having been exposed to a thorough inspiration, a pour)–

These the effects of unintentional public seclusion?

Eerily thus…

Some of what I wrote during the part of the hypnosis when (because I was a “listener”) I was not allowed to speak:

Tender abrasions can be–

Tenderly abrasive, to turn the torsos. Torsos are made into more than midsections when they fly up from the Cave of Brahma. Torsos gleam, with their with our. Spacious gullets. Sapping carnal quills. A side view of quail eggs being slowly ravaged by a spring storm.

Spring storms were my preference when you stopped staring. Visceral replacements? Dried slabs of meat and stone babies.

The torsos are dripping liquefied amulets. Swear by me. Swear a day then a night then a day, without having woken. Swear by divergent. Vows. Trust ephemeral organs.

Conjugate having copulated with a bust.

Memory stolen or harvested?

It was that I knew I could fulfill you but found that I still couldn’t. Still life torso. Is a stone breast meant to come back into human form? Hold the breast, the stone hand, the unpronounced places. Hold to ensure these won’t be farmed until they are ready.

Nobody wants to eat from haunted stalk; to listen so deeply to atonal truths.