When you said: I wish to be a fish not humen
I remembered that I wanted to be a crow, or something / a being like a human-crow-hybrid that could be part of the crowd of crows I was observing. [...]
[...] i think your crow project is very connected to my work with fish […].
Also your work with the different aspects of crows, the physical and the metaphorical:
my fish project is also several big textile fish/sea creatures, and a long poem, that is about becoming fish, choosing the fish instead of frisk/healthy/normal, but also about the symbolic wor(l)d of fish (the christian symbol of fish, as a secret sign) and different word-plays involving fish and sea. […]
The borderland of medicine and art is so intriguing for me, i think it is, my whole world, since it is both the limits and the possibilities, the private and the professional, the political, philosophical, extremely everyday, etc. [...]
I also see a lot of connections between our works/interests - like swimming birds and flying fish
like: aut/oimmune and aut/istic ... [...]
Becoming is a big issue for me, too;
I have this idea or concept of autoimmunity as a transformative process; instead of seeing it as a malfunction of the immune system
- or as a "civil war going on inside my body" (this is the view of bio-medicine, this is how medical professionals explained it to me -and that there is no healing, just the possibility of controlling the symptoms).
Here I saw a connection with your "Anna N. - annan" - the fascination of the other, the strange, and the hidden.
If one translates the traditional medical understanding of being autoimmune, it means that you are "unable" to recognize "yourself",
that you identify "Self" as "Other", and therefore your immune system starts to "attack" your own cells, your own inner organs.
I think that the immune system is doing something big with this autoimmune (re)actions – like following a plan, a plan that's still a mystery to us, but it has something to do with becoming; (probably becoming posthuman). [...]
[...] When I read this in your email:
aut/oimmune and aut/istic ...
my hands went all stimming I love that!! Also: aut/hor (a term I love-hate-struggle with, sometimes turning into aut/hor-ror)
and I also decided I need to make a text-ile swan (swimming bird!) I will send you the picture (maybe with cat if she feels friendly with the swan)(more in the sound then in the writing: bird-word – also, with your name: barb-bird – I often think of how to find twins/siblings/pseudotwins for the letters when words are together, like :
BARB : BIRD
B +B… R + R … then A & I (oh it became the AI I think that everyone around me seems to be obsessed with, I didn’t mean for that to happen but maybe it’s fun! I havn’t thought much about ai, but I think there is something interesting in how some people seem to be very afr/ai/d because of something strange-strange and some agency-out-of-agency (???) and I like the sound “ai” (Swedish: AJ, is thesound “AOUCH”, like when it hurts, and “h-aj” is the word for “shark”..) … then B + D (no explanation atm) /// there is also both a Braid and a Barbie there inside…) [...]
On the Becoming and war-inside:
When being diagnosed with anorexia I was constantly told my actions where not My Actions, it was the Sickness Acting/Speaking. That made me feel 1: what feels like me/my action/my feelings-thoughts/my body – they say it’s not me – there is an enemy inside, but I don’t feel the presence of someone else, I am my enemy… 2: the “I” that I don’t feel, who is that? A strange thing that they say is there or what??? 3: I feel (at least) like 2 – I, and not-I, the healthy-I, that they where talking about, and the sick-I that just hurts itself.
Doctors, and parents, talked about (Swedish) “mitt friska jag”, My Healthy/Well I. frisk-fisk. The misspelling spoke more to me than the well-being (the being here as a being, a thing/creature) that I did not understand and that just made me cry…
So, by this I mean: I recognize the metaphor of war.
It also have similarities with the rethorics about autism: the discussion of “people with autism” vs “autistic people/autistics/autists”: when (non-autistic people, mostly but not only) want to separate the person from the autism.
I think, when living as aut (or what ever this can be called) it’s not really possible (at least that’s my feeling) to really do this separation, and yet, it is also impossible to ignore the medical words, the medical discourse (because it acts on physical, mental, economic, social etc etc levels) so the feeling is: STRANGE. And it can never stop, never just BE, it stays a becoming-process working in different directions always struggling, windling, tracing, following, loooosing, finding, folding, unfolding, edging, failing, falling, bubbling (just trying out words here, some of them I’m not completely sure the meaning of!)
Oh, and I deeply sympathize with aut/hor-ror - this has always been a problem for me: any kind of self-description / professional definition.
Not so long ago I came up with this (email-)signature: Barb Macek
Autoimmune eccentric
Selfdiffering, selfdissolving entity, multiplicity
Less and more than one
All at the same time.
And thank you for finding Barb-Bird!
Title: In search for the animality in/of language (MAYBE PRESENTED AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THIS NODE? OR DO WE WANT CREATE THAT ONE ANOTHER TIME?)
Short description:
What words do we have to speak to / about / in regard to animals? How can we write about them, where do we find them in our language, in our poems, stories, essays? What are animals telling us? What can we say about their language / communication with us?
With our thematic node within the framework of language-based artistic research we are investigating the animality of/in language, we are trying to find words that live up to what animals are to us / what we are to them, and we are trying to find the meaning of animals in language.
There are different practices how to investigate this matter, shared by the group members: Anna N. is creating text-ile animals, for example fish, old clothes filled with soft fish … (here comes your description / explanation etc.)
Barb is looking for pain animals / animal pains in poems and pictures, arranging them to collages that represent new categories of how to express pain … (here I should go into further detail) ...
The goal is to find a new way of speaking/writing/expressing animality as humans, to cross the species-borders on the level (not only) of language, and to create the possibility for new meanings to emerge. Others interested in this subject are warmly invited to join our thematic node.
(We also need an image, it could be your text-ile fish, combined with a poem, ...)
Hi barb/brab
(”bra” in swedish means ”good”, ”bar” means ”bar” but also “naked” and ”bara” means “only”, in the swedish translation of Louise Penny’s crime novels about Inspector Gamache, the poet Ruth Zardo (who lives with her duck Rosa) has a smashing literary hit with a book of poetry called “BRA”, where BRA means “Bajs Rent Allmänt” literary translated to english: “poop cleanly/purely generally” but more “correctly”: “just shit” – as a if someone asks “how are you” and one answers “bra” now there is the secret meaning that it is also “just shit” (i think in the english original there is something else) ... i don’t know... i just thought about all this within your name when i wrote it, inside, there is the good the only the clean the shit etc... it sort of is a world in itself)
What you write about the social resonates much with me. I don’t have a diagnosis tied to my social interactions but i have problems with being with humans.
Not in text! That is my way of being social.
But i don’t like speaking in telephones (only with my parents, we have a very well established way of doing that) and being physically in the same room.
Though, i have discovered that teaching suits me very well, even though it is very social: i know what to do, i have my teacher-persona, but the moment the seminar stops, i often feel like crying. Your email-signature is wonderful.
I was also thinking: the social interaction with the different-differing parts of a self, also sometimes frightening, i think.
I was thinking about the first:
I once wrote something about language allowing me to become less-than-or-more-than-human, language as a very un-human thing, and someone responded, that isn’t language the Most Human thing, and i just didn’t understand that. Also, i think about a book, “Following the Animal”, it’s a swedish literature scholar, Ann-Sofie Lönngren, who wrote it. I have thought so much about “following” as a concept (i’ll write more about that later, but i happened to read this book almost at the same time as i read another book “Following Djuna” by Carolyn Allen, about micro-reading queer or lesbian moments in literature – the title refers to Djuna Barnes, there are a lot of animals in Barnes texts).
And for the second:
Maybe adding the aut/hor-ror, as a thing that sort of disturbs within or next to the aut, and makes it scary but also triggers something, and also invites to a rethinking of aut/hor(ror)-ship...
Do you think we should choose one only? I think they are siblings.
ah that's good, just shit; and at the same time good, only;
you know, I never felt in accordance with my given name, which is Barbara, 1. because it is a very female name with its triple-a, too fixed for my liking, and 2. it is a very redundant name, with its 3 as and 2 rs and 2 bs; everything is said after Bar (I just added the second b to make it more name-like and speakable, turning it into Barb). In regard to its etymology, the name comes from "barbar" - barbaric, savage, raw, uncivilized; the Romans mockingly described other peoples, actually all Non-Romans, as barbarians because their languages sounded to them like uttering "bar-bar-bar", so barbar also means: strange person, speaking in unintelligible tones; I can relate with this meaning, with the stranger uttering incomprehensible noises/sounds.
Yes, very true: that it can be frightening, disturbing, painful as well, these social interactions within oneself, between the different parts of the self. Sometimes this ambivalence inside me really and literally knocks me over. Then I can only exist horizontally, for a while.