Tag: metaphor

by jad

A Note on Aura

I had my aura photographed as a birthday treat on Friday. That experience & this ongoing heatwave seem to be conspiring to get me thinking about bodies again. For one, I don’t like being photographed at all, which is why I wanted to have this moment in time captured in the first place—which made one of the color associations on the little info-card they gave me even more interesting, once my photo had developed: my dominant “vibrational energy” was associated with “new beginnings.” I also don’t like to feel sweaty and gross and physically encumbered by needs & anxieties, & … Continue reading “A Note on Aura” →

by jad

The Feast of Saint Marinx

“[T]he question of the pharmakon reappears in the digital stage of grammatisation—the first stage of which was the alphabetic writing of Plato’s epoch. Like every technique and every mnemotechnique, cultural and cognitive technologies are pharmaka: at once poisons and remedies.” (Bernard Stiegler) Communication has made itself felt as a matter of concern at numerous times and on multiple planes over the past few weeks. ☿℞ or not, at some point, it seems like the artifice of this act of artfully inscribing interior realities back and forth on these proverbial clay tablets has been lost by our culture. I’ve been thinking about … Continue reading “The Feast of Saint Marinx” →

by jad

“these ghosts, those ghosts, our ghosts”

The second volume of @thedepressedwaitress arrived in my mailbox alongside Easter blessings from the Servants of Mary, a religious order somewhere in Illinois; they’ve been sending me seasonal greetings ever since I asked for their prayers & relic fragments in a wild attempt at doing something, anything—come on, feel the Illinoise—in the totalizing face of medical certainty. I didn’t start reading this volume until today, the same day I learned about Donna Haraway’s shared Eucharistic devotion & spiritual kinship with Bruno Latour in an endnote to an essay about spiders and tentacles and corvids and lichen, the same day I took the … Continue reading ““these ghosts, those ghosts, our ghosts”” →

by jad

Year Zero: Hypertexture

Shortly after New Year’s Day, as part of a staff meeting check-in on Zoom, I was asked if I had a “word for the coming year.” That question hadn’t occurred to me before they’d asked it, but a word still rushed into view very quickly; after a few had volunteered to share why they’d chosen the words they’d chosen, I pressed unmute and said: “I have a one in mind, but I’m not going to explain it—I’ll just say the word: ‘wholeness’.” The thing is–I’ve been struggling with words for quite some time. What used to come to me like … Continue reading “Year Zero: Hypertexture” →