+
[Note: it’s just Danika Stegeman now, but this book was written/published when there was a LeMay part so that’s why it’s there in the title]
+
After centuries of self-excavation
self-exhibition
Star Trek, methadone
I now know what ablation means.
+
I think it’s the Cantonese study that did it, I’m leaking words, words have abandoned me, I sound like a primary school student at times, no one uses ‘ablation’ in my daily life, even in Cantonese, why would they?
+
For the sake of my mental health, I’m trimming
these de-con-strucs to no more than 500 words.
12,000 words feels like a waste
nothing into the ether.
Still, I got a lot out of it.
Ignore the philosophy parts.
+
In an Other Books piece on Ablation – that series is dead now, don’t think anyone appreciates having their novel predicted accurately or inaccurately, it drained all my energy that I can drain elsewhere, like in the Trash F-Log series that everyone likes, check out House 2 – I talked about Danika writing about her daughter and mother, the latter one especially tough as how exactly do you confess someone else’s sins truths, your view of them?
+
+
The blue tone of Ablation on the cover of this book of poems is beautiful.
Makes me want to abrogate other blues.
+
The advance praise – I don’t like this part of books generally, it is quite useful here – says Ablation is about the loss of a mother. Not just A mother, but THE mother.
You are in relation to this person from the first white dot [some Under The Skin residue here, I still haven’t watched it, the white dot opening is very memorable though], nine months to develop feelings of love + disgust that you have no framework of meaning for, that you will never understand, then the rest of your life to implant a reality on top of that.
My mother raised me and my two sisters pretty much on her own while working a day job. She had an oppressive form of OCD. I don’t know how much of that I should detail, it feels wrong somehow, she’s not dead, she’ll never read this, would it be my confession or her exposure?
I’ll do story inserts now and then, using an old NES game – The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy – as a cloak of invisibility. It’ll be around 94% autobiographical.
+
+
One of the advance praise pieces is quite detailed, noting oblique architecture + glaciers in Danika’s work.
It’s still too vague.
Too floaty.
Here is my advance praise, having only skimmed the book at this point: ‘the witch is gone, you hated her, she wasn’t that bad, please come back, who understands anyone?’
If you have no [close] relationship with your parents, are you just waiting for them to die so you can evaluate?
What did I think of her/him?
+
+
My mum feels guilty for what she put me and my sisters through, I can feel that.
She would put us all through it again, there’s no choice in her head.
That level of OCD is obliterative.
She never really asks me questions beyond how is your life right now?
There is no curiosity about Hong Kong [or Japan before].
My wife’s mother is the same.
The same in various ways e.g. mental health, raising 3 kids by herself, anxiety, paranoia etc.
She talks only about herself, her past.
Complains about her husband [my wife’s father].
When did parents become children?
Do these selfish fucks not reflect on anything?
Say thank you for the Taiwan trip, you wretch.
+
My wife’s mum is quite funny.
I remember one time she was trying to tell me a story about a fire in Kwun Tong in the 90’s – her Cantonese is rapid fire, Woody Allen syntax, it used to be really tough for me to keep up – and her mimicking of a fire hose looked like a machine gun. And I misheard Kwun Tong as Kwok Fu Shing [Aaron Kwok, local singer/film star/possible vampire].
It’s funny cos of the language barrier, I suppose.
My mum isn’t really funny.
Maybe cos she doesn’t speak Cantonese?
+
Ablation opens with:
+
+
It’s a ‘cut that misses, a cut made clean, the clasp of a snapdragon’s jaw.’
Those three are not the same thing.
Cut that misses = she is not hurt by being motherless.
Cut made clean = it’s been said bluntly + fully understood.
Clasp of a snapdragon’s jaw = this feeling will not be letting go.
Maybe writing this book will help?
Now that she’s physically, in this material context,
motherless,
there remains only the mythology.
+
‘Anxiety pins me in place. I’ve got 60 needles aimed at my center, one point for each year of her life.’
+
I like that it’s ‘60’, not ‘sixty.’
Her mother feels oppressive, suffocating.
Why is her death causing such anxiety?
It’s time to feel something.
+
I skimmed through Ablation when it arrived in the post, when I took it for a walk around Shatin and Shing Mun River, and I got the impression that Danika did not have a good relationship with her mum.
One line later says, ‘if you can’t bear to cut the children in half, let the children decide where to halve themselves.’
A separation of parents?
Kids as pawns?
+
+
My parents separated when I was five years old and thank fuck for that.
Living with my dad would have been abysmal.
The man worships boats over people, over his own kids.
Living with my mum was bizarre
also abysmal
comforting
and ultimately re-wired my brain to self-destruct at 27.
I’ve never recovered.
Not inside.
At least I have my writing, my novels.
That no one gives a fuck about.
I’m starting to hate them.
They’re like a room that even the phantoms can’t be bothered with [Alain-Robbe-Grillet via Satanite].
Writing about other writers’ work is better, easier.
De-con-struc is a sanctuary of sorts.
I like doing this.
Most of you are clearly sociopaths though.
So deeply insecure that you can’t confess to not knowing anything.
Not funny either.
When did writers become planks of wood?
+
In the spirit of this sudden/bitter confessional, there’s about 9 or 10 writers I’ve come across who I think are sincere/human/funny, 9 or 10 who might be A.I., and the rest are just there.
+
To be honest, I’m so remote, so distant that I don’t know anyone in the writing community.
If it is a community.
+
Is it a community?
+
Danika is American, I think.
A tough gig.
Home of some of the best writing historically and around 90% of the worst/most mediocre.
Can’t stand American auto-fiction, the modern type.
Feel sorry for its creators.
Not their fault their lives read like a parody.
Not their fault the whole world has been suffocated by Americanism for the last 100 years.
+
Confessionals always turn to insults.
Don’t worry, I don’t like my writing much either.
I’ve moved beyond ‘starting to hate’ and now just don’t wanna look at it ever again.
Elytron [Frass] told me a while back that he was gonna read Void Galaxia and I thought, what the fuck would you wanna do that for?
Just picturing the first 200 pages makes me depressed.
The last 500 are extraordinary.
No one’s gonna get that far.
+
The thing about Danika is she is not a plank of wood.
She’s quite funny.
Very alive, in the sense that she goes places and does things and writes about them in a skewed way.
I’m not sure Ablation will be funny.
Should have contradictions though.
She’s good at those.
+
If I could point to one book of mine that I suspect you would appreciate, Danika, it would be Charcoal.
It’s auto-fiction [non-American].
Meshed with surrealism.
Probably a bit dated now [it was written around 2008].
I don’t hate it.
+
It sounds a bit weird to talk directly to you here, Danika, but de-con-strucs are a very personal thing. It’s between me and your book, which is an extension of you. I could give two fucks about anyone else reading this. They are irrelevant.
+
‘I feel like a thousand dead birds, one brother says.’
+
I don’t believe he said this.
Maybe a variation of it?
If he didn’t say it, why does Danika write that he did?
She’s already trying to poeticise her mother’s death, transmogrify it into art/ablation, where she feels more comfortable?
+
Feeling like a thousand dead birds means he feels numb x 1000?
Numb is numb.
Adding more numbness doesn’t strengthen the sensation cos there is none.
Maybe he did say that line.
Maybe he’s trying to poeticise his reaction to his mother’s death too?
+
Danika plus 2 brothers = 3
Me and my 2 sisters = 3
There could be some depressing parallels here.
No, wait, there’s a sister.
That means 4.
4 = death in Chinese.
+
Danika is making a physical grief box.
She is mishearing things.
Her senses are out of whack and she’s relying on physical artefacts to pin the memories to.
Memories mythology.
+
+
‘A glacier lapses time’ reminds me of ‘decompose’ as a verb. Something has usurped the passive [time] and forced it into object-servitude.
Of course it is impossible.
The glaciers are melting now.
Could reform again later.
Why is her mother compared to one?
Theory: her mother has overcome time [temporarily] to haunt Danika as an inescapable presence who can ‘move through variations’ based on the mood of any particular moment.
She has lapsed time via Danika’s brain only.
+
+
The fear of inheriting the flaws of the parents.
It’s not a fear.
It’s already happened to me.
I grew up with my mother, was infected by how her brain perceived the outside world, the dormant/lurking threat of it.
She didn’t have to tell me.
It’s not genetics or DNA.
I lived through it.
Maybe genetics in the way that my infant brain wired itself to align with my mother’s madness.
I don’t know.
But it’s in me.
+
With Danika, it seems to be a specific heart defect.
Something that makes it beat too fast, too erratically.
She categorises it as ‘incoherence,’ as ‘holes open where walls should be.’
This makes it sound exciting/dangerous.
A hole can lead to a bed of spikes.
Or Wonderland.
Where a mad queen chops off heads.
You’re still alive but for how long, in what kind of mental state?
+
+
A switch to Danika’s daughter.
‘line as ice is a line.’
Not sure what this means. Just a continuation of the glacier metaphor?
She did write in the previous poem that ‘ablation’ can scrape the ice/snow from her ‘land.’
‘Our hearts beat a finite number. We’re not inexhaustible, drawn between water and air.’
Water is vapour is water again.
The heart has slowed down, become infinitely finite, no longer a threat but an acceptance?
+
+
A mutation from ‘lay still’ to ‘ghost body lying still’ and ‘world fluttering,’ not her heart.
Her mom is dead and a dark-haired girl.
Danika is in control of this image.
Is she merging with it?
Must be as it’s a little ghost body and its circle of influence is the entire world.
Entire world = within Danika’s psyche.
+
There is a largeness to the poems now.
‘Your cells contain the universe/Aquatic ecosystems in jars.’
A mix of the intimate, of time stamps, of constructing a world for a coming-future adult [her daughter].
‘Like plaster lining walls into rooms, I paper a world from slits and folds.’
Translation: I’m doing what I can with what I have available to me.
The slits/folds from her mother’s construction?
+
Everything I am is either from my mother, my sisters or Star Trek.
The psyche is unstakeable.
You can’t reel back memories and locate the origin of yourself cos you’ve murdered billions of them already.
The lasting ones are those that supernova’d.
You can see proof of those.
+
+
One thing I got from my mother besides mental fog is left wing politics.
I would’ve got that anyway.
I could be nothing else but left wing
innately
is not a very left wing view of ontology.
If I had been born into a right wing, religious family, what then?
A sum of influences/infections.
Certain Others in certain contexts in a repeated series of encounters would’ve broken me out.
Or dragged me down deeper.
+
To be right wing is to accept a stake in Hell and then attune your brain to Hell Radio and allow the disintegration process to accelerate.
How does anyone live like that?
I’d rather starve to death in a shack on the left than have the intellectual diameter of a peanut.
+
Some of my long-gone friends were soft right wing, my dad too.
They’re not so bad.
Like American auto-fiction, they can’t help it.
Their political views are child-like.
Pragmatic from the POV of Hell.
I don’t speak to them anymore.
One guy said suicide was cowardice and voted against gay marriage in Australia cos it would make his own marriage lose all meaning.
What a silly cunt.
Economically he was left wing though.
Studied Buddhism and Tibetan.
Stanned [for?] the Zionists.
Had a soft voice.
Said a raped ten-year-old should be forced to give birth.
Adored multi-culturalism.
Couldn’t speak Cantonese very well.
Too timid.
Wonder what he’s up to now.
I don’t really care.
Humans are a fucking mess.
+
+
I remember that my mum’s favourite director was Peter Greenaway. She had all his films on VHS…except The Pillow Book. I sold that at a pawn shop when I was 16 so I could go out drinking.
In terms of mother-daughter-daughter of daughter, Drowning By Numbers comes to mind.
It’s obviously different from Ablation as there is no fixed viewpoint and each of the women kill their spouse/lover, and each of them has progressively less of a good reason to do so, with the granddaughter, Joely Richardson, basically murdering a “puppy” who can’t swim.
It’s quite bleak that scene.
What is the film saying?
The mother infects the daughter or the daughter apes the mother?
Not the mother, but an act she commits [murder], stripped of all meaning, leaving only the sign itself.
Does Joely Richardson know why her grandma killed her granddad?
I can’t remember.
Ablation is not about any of this.
Maybe the infection part?
The passing on of something not fully understood?
+
+
Glacier is back,
advancing,
moving so slowly that you mistake it for no movement at all.
If I knew about glaciers, I could comment on this metaphor.
Do they pick up debris as they move?
Is ‘debris’ positive or negative in this case?
Should be negative, something annihilated, the remains of it.
Yet, if it’s all you’ve got?
+
Glacier = Danika.
Or the memories of Danika?
The glacier does not reflect on its own advance, or the gathering of debris, so she is something outside of this process, a servant to it.
+
The next page has a line: ‘My mom’s memories mismatch me.’
What is this based on?
How does Danika know her mom’s memories?
Psychologically, this could be a ‘pocket-mother’ inside of Danika’s head, one that is more apparent since her death. Or has come into existence since her death?
I do not think much about my father now, but, if he died tomorrow, a ‘pocket-father’ may be birthed, saying, ‘why didn’t you try more?’ And what I know of his life, what I experienced in orbit of him, would become a skewed version of his memories, with my erratic interpretation as chief-architect.
Would I be a fair advocate? A masochistic one?
Maybe the latter.
Then a corrective to scorched sadism.
I don’t know.
+
Has Danika created a ‘mother-golem’ inside her head?
‘Golem’ implies ‘from nothing, from clay.’
‘Pocket-mother’ sounds better.
+
+
This line is on the back of the book so it must be a good one.
A mix of terror, exhaustion, fondness.
But it’s a self-haunting.
Which means the ‘loved’ part is a perspective of desire from Danika herself.
She’s interpreting flickering bulbs as her mother’s ghost, perhaps existing now as dark matter.
She was a dark-haired girl.
Dark matter isn’t dark, it’s invisible, undetectable as its true form.
[I don’t know much about dark matter, just some Isaac Arthur vids, I think he might be a libertarian]
If it’s a surrounding entity then it either protects, exists or suffocates.
+
+
This is on the adjacent page to the ‘haunted’ line.
I assume it’s Danika writing about her daughter.
In a car crash, she becomes the ‘surrounding entity,’ protecting that which she loves.
The mother as dark matter is nebulous.
Danika as ‘body-halo’ is protective.
There are different shades of love here, all of them insecure/unstable. Those related to her mother and herself are speculative, desperate to grow love out of something unknown, whereas the ‘body-halo’ is pure, completely without thought or restraint.
But there is no car crash.
Danika is dreaming one up so she can absorb her daughter in love.
This is a reflex-spasm to the dark-matter-mom?
Danika can’t be sure of that love so she forces herself to conjure up a corrective, a supreme love-act.
‘Supreme love-act’ sounds more philosophical than ‘supreme love.’
Just put a hyphen between any two nouns.
That’s what I’ve become used to.
+
+
Form of this section?
Each page on the left has a small 10-line prose poem aligned to the left, while each page on the right has a small 10-line prose poem that is aligned centrally.
I haven’t counted every line of every poem, but I think this is probably consistent.
There may be other patterns, I’m not sure.
Some pages have images, a memento from Danika’s mom’s life?
Is there a meaning in this strict-ish form?
Probably.
Why would Danika do it that way if it didn’t have a purpose?
It doesn’t happen by accident.
[On accident? This is the American way, right? Not ‘by accident?’]
Some of the poems sit on a double page spread in contradiction to each other.
Like the ‘haunted’ one and the ‘body-halo’ car crash blanket.
They also respond to each other. Not always in contradiction, but an elaboration, a consequence.
+
[I’ve just checked the notes section at the back and, it turns out, the 10 lines are 2 chunks of 5 lines operating under the name of ‘mirror-cinquains, so a very strict form then]
+
[No one ever told me about mirror-cinquains]
+
[I’m a terrible poet]
+
+
In the first pic, there is an attempt to move on, to deal with what the glacier is doing [attempt at control of process too? Boxing a garden in sunlight…].
In the second one, the daughter again, seen through Danika’s psyche, growing into the world, ‘separate from everything’ yet ‘sharing symmetry.’
‘As you form a sense of self, you recognize that you’re separate from everything.’
This is an interesting line.
Danika is speaking for someone [her daughter] but can only make the claim in the second clause based on her own experience of growing up.
It’s a mix of herself and her daughter.
Separation + symmetry.
+
In this kind of book, everything is Danika.
Herself, her mom, her daughter, You, We, Them, the Kontolians, Derrida, the guy in the garbage chute etc.
It’s messy, controlling, sentimental, Vulcan, Klingon, disgusted, depressed, forgiving.
When she uses ‘You,’ she’s authoritative.
When it’s ‘I’, she’s all over the place.
This is just from a few pages I’ve looked at, it may not hold up through the whole book.
Maybe it shouldn’t?
Grief is a live process.
The authoritative is an attempt at authority cos she’s a mother now and that’s what a mother should be.
But she’s also a daughter who knows that parents are flawed. And, in some cases, know fuck all about anything.
+
‘The phlebotomist draws vials.’
+
New word [that I’ll never use].
Surgeon who cuts into a vein.
Better not to think about that.
+
The poems take a turn into specific-medical and then body-metaphor.
Danika’s mom couldn’t have ablation on her heart, so the defect remained.
Defect turns into trauma, passed through the circulatory system, the womb.
+
+
This follows the detail of her mom’s condition and that trauma is transmitted through the body, and this kind of innateness has infected the mood of Danika here, reducing her to a negative state that cannot be fought or helped.
Is it a direct reaction to the defect near her mom’s heart?
The surgeons saying ablation is impossible in this case?
+
My mum’s mental problem/issue/trauma was so specific in its output/fixation that I never thought it would afflict me [or my sisters].
She was fucking insane and we could all see that.
But the defect was still there.
Not inside me as an offspring, I don’t believe in this kind of genetic passing on, but a ‘mirror-entity’ that would develop its own specific output/fixation later in my life [around 27].
Something that became genetic via constant exposure to the things my mum did.
I’m not a biologist.
[Or a phlebotomist].
+
+
Yet I know what my mum endured.
It was a miserable life.
Not ‘life’ exactly, but a miserable psychological state to face it with.
To raise three kids in the maelstrom of all that.
I have no anger towards her for passing a version of it onto me, or what she did from within its husk.
It’s not her fault.
+
+
It seems that Danika’s mom endured a lot of misery too.
‘Keening of flowers’
I searched this and it says ‘keening’ is a Gaelic lament at funerals, a type of wailing for the dead.
Danika is a flower that wails?
Another contradiction: why would a lovely flower wail? Or maybe a juxtaposition as we don’t know the psychological state of the flower or how it feels.
The image of a wailing flower is odd.
Keening is cathartic.
If you wail for your mother’s pain, it can reshape the other parts e.g. anger, disappointment, estrangement, masochism etc.
+
There is symmetry discovered.
‘I’d break glass and swallow smoke for you. She’d tear her last dollar in half, cross plains to help you escape.’
I assume this is Danika towards her daughter, and then Danika’s mom towards her.
Love in adversity.
+
Care for her mother when sick and care for her young daughter blur into one another.
At least I think that’s what I’m reading.
The last few poems of the ‘ABLATION’ section are quite hard-going emotionally.
‘Some days I’m made of bone. Other days I’m made of water.’
There is no permanent, unchanging thing.
Every place she loves was covered in ice on one page, then every place she loves is carved open on the next.
This lack of firm footing, this ‘all over the place’ Danika is so affecting that I want to reach into the pages of the book and pat her on the head like my long-dead dog and say, ‘there, there, it’ll pass.’
It’s weird that an image like that comes to mind, a bit patronising maybe.
Do I see people as dogs?
Only when they’re lost, maybe.
I don’t know.
+
+
I think this might be from the ‘ABLATION’ section, actually, not the succeeding one [‘FIELD’].
It matches the form of those poems.
And appears to be the cultivation of all the metaphors into a new ‘body-form’, each one working in cohesion with the other.
Very optimistic, in other words.
This ‘FIELD’ section obviously means these particular poems were written in a field. There’s a picture/photo on the first page to confirm it.
+
+
Danika is a Viking?
Her mom’s grandparents emigrated from Denmark.
I might have Viking blood in me too.
An anxious, depressed, paranoid type of Viking that would’ve stayed in the village and said, ‘raid who, for what?’
+
‘A stand of pines obscures the house’
+
The poetics are still present, but this section is telling the story of Danika going back to her mother’s childhood home. Possibly her childhood home too, I’m not sure.
There’s a mix of secondary memories that her mom must’ve told her at some point and firsthand ones of her own, including the beating of her six-year-old brother for eating cold hotdogs.
Again, there’s a symmetry, her mother suffering at the hands of her parents – not allowed to touch things in the house – and then transferring that to her own kids.
+
+
Danika has the same memories of her grandmother that I do of mine.
As in, we didn’t really know them at all.
Though I did visit my grandmother a lot and enjoy her cooking. But then I found out later that she liked Oswald Mosley in the 1930’s and was deeply conservative despite studying at the Jung Institute [maybe there is no contradiction there, study of the psyche can be partitioned off from cultural politics if you study hard enough and don’t have any left wing friends].
My mum was adopted.
Technically, the grandmother I’m talking about is not my blood.
I don’t believe in blood-essentialism.
She was not of my class.
Her garden always looked beautiful.
Had a swing-ball set too, remember those?
+
‘My mom becomes a memory of the flowers.
I don’t know where our people are buried.’
+
That last line is aligned on the left, so that it’s alone?
The other text in this section doesn’t have that type of alignment.
Danika has reclaimed her mother as a field of god-light flowers.
Everyone else, the grandmother, the ancestors, Ivar the Boneless, Eric Bloodaxe, Sweyn Forkbeard, Cnut the Unwet etc., is abstract, unknown.
Makes sense.
There is grandparent-parent-child and that’s it for those you’d wrestle in your head to make a nostalgic memory out of.
+
+
This section [‘I MAKE LISTS’], is everything good about Danika’s mom, even potentially bad stuff.
E.g. ‘she wouldn’t insult you by letting you win.’
Why does Danika [the Boneless] need to remember this?
Cos the first part of the book feels too accusatory/negative?
That was my general feeling: love despite the glacier.
But then I remembered that a book isn’t live theory, it’s a planned thing [unless it’s written by me].
And this part places Danika’s mother into her daughter’s life, and her granddaughter’s too.
She calls her ‘my little beauty,’ teaches her how to skim stones.
Maybe she did this with Danika too, only it’s been forgotten?
Or overwritten?
I don’t know.
Raising four kids as an active parent versus dropping in on one kid as the grandmother.
Not even close to the same thing.
+
+
The list in the middle pic [WordPress can’t do columns on the phone without a plug-in, so that’s why it’s like this] focuses entirely on her mother’s illness, the last memories of her, the lack of knowing what she felt in those moments.
Could be related to Danika’s own fear of death, the unknown quality of it?
The list in the bottom pic is made up of memories and mementos [not the mint] of her, the trace she left behind, even in the grass and the trees.
With a simple line at the end.
‘I miss her and wish her peace swift as her heart.’
Love + acknowledgment of a tough life, the exact same thing I feel about my own mum.
+
+
Danika relates herself to a basketball player in this section [‘CENTER’].
Are the Minnesota Timberwolves a basketball team? I don’t know. I think so. I’m not American. Danika posts some basketball game pics on IG sometimes, so it should be that.
This player, Karl-Anthony Towns, talks of a telepathic connection with his mum, even when she lay in a coma.
Danika says her mum knew when her granddaughter was due, told her to get her ass to the hospital.
All the player quotes are inter-mixed with Danika’s feelings and memories.
Either the timing of it or the specificity of the words hit her hard enough to come up with this section.
It’s an almost supernatural connection, or a quantum pairing that can never be severed/ablated.
+
Why is ‘CENTER’ placed here, in this part of the book?
Does the arrangement of the sections have a design, a purpose?
I have assumed so already, and I assume it again now.
The arrangement is based on whimsy?
Grief is chaotic, multi-faceted.
I suppose it’s been charted by psychologists. The 5, 6, 7, 10 stages of grief.
So far, we have:
I MOUTH THE WORD MOTHERLESS – Immediate loss/shock of mom’s death.
ABLATION – Glacier metaphor, difficult mother-figure, trying to move on, failing to move on, going back to the glacier metaphor, bringing the heart in too.
FIELD – Revisiting her mom’s home, more difficult mother-figure stuff, flower comparison implying love usurping traumatic mud-glacier-thing.
I MAKE LISTS – love for mum, realism + sentiment
CENTER – Quantum connection, quantum grief.
Seems to be a journey towards a more positive layer of memory-love, but not a complete discarding of the difficult aspects of her mother.
In CENTER, the basketball player’s grief is single-minded and his mother is drawn as someone almost divine.
Danika enmeshes herself between the folds of these parts, yet her feelings are a little more ambivalent. She is missing her mother, but still references that the ‘obsidian’ [from her] was double-edged; both a shield to the world and a blade to protect from the worst of her [the mother-figure].
It’s an interesting approach, kind of like Danika is riding as a passenger across the grief-plain of another in order to…absorb some of it? To explain it?
+
+
Another section called ‘FIELD.’
I’ve looked ahead and there several more coming after this.
The first one was a revisiting of Danika’s mom’s childhood home, while this one is a drawn-out analysis/portrait of a photograph of her mother clutching a car door.
+
+
Each ‘FIELD’ section is a specific reference to her mother’s past, with a Danika insert to remind us that she’s there too, processing all this.
It’s her FIELD as much as her mother’s.
More than her mother’s?
‘My mother is a nebula.’
Which leaves a lot of detail to fill in.
Who was her mother at that point [when the photo was taken]?
How much of it carried over to Danika?
Is the car door okay?
+
My mum looks relatively happy in most of the photos I’ve seen of her.
Photos from before I was born.
That mother is not real.
The photo captured nothing of her.
She was suicidal the night before her wedding.
The next day, ‘nice church, happiest day of my life etc.’
But when there’s a photo where she’s not smiling, what does that mean?
Did she give something away/get caught off guard?
+
+
I flicked to this section [‘THE NOTHING’] at random when
I first received Ablation and
it felt demonic.
Wasn’t expecting that.
[Note: I also read this as an extract [on Selffuck?] which was what first led me to Danika]
Reeling it back a little, THE NOTHING doesn’t
have to be a demon.
+
‘The nothing’s outside the bathroom door
when my mom’s father puts his dick in her 3-year-old hands.
+
‘The nothing jams balled up socks in her mouth.‘
+
‘The nothing ignores her muffled screams
when her stepfather rapes her at 15.‘
+
‘The nothing marks you for future abuse
and then abandons you.’
+
It’s god
The observer and the doer,
The enabler.
+
But it’s also ‘nothing.’
It might not even be there.
Can a ‘nothing’ be there?
If it has a name…
+
+
It appears that the nothing is an entity, a Dark Dane that transfers itself into and around and out of different hosts, a thing that explains the dark things that happen to Danika’s mom, instigates them, and then pollutes her too, becoming so entwined that its habits are indistinguishable from those of its host.
The transferal process is quite smooth, from a nebulous poltergeist-type thing to a traumatised adult, over five pages, with several moments when I’m not sure if the nothing is in Danika’s body or her mom’s. Or someone else’s, a male figure.
It ties in with the fear of genetic inheritance I think I mentioned earlier.
How much of ‘the nothing’ will transfer to Danika?
Can it find fertile ground anywhere?
+
+
Format-wise, this section is mostly single lines starting with ‘The nothing…’
‘The nothing’ has a lower-case ‘n.’
I’ve counted them out and there are 73 lines in total.
67 of those begin with ‘The nothing…’
At 3 different points, two lines are forced together:
+
‘The nothing walks quietly.
The nothing builds terrariums.’
+
‘The nothing bequeaths you a lacquered guitar.
The nothing is a gifted raconteur.’
+
‘The nothing leaves cigarettes burning.
The nothing cries only for itself.’
+
Why?
I don’t think syllables matter here.
The six lines not beginning with ‘The nothing…’ could be a desperate attempt to break free of its influence. To not have it control the sentence.
But its ether-prints are still there in the subject matter.
The 6 lines forced together?
I’m still not sure.
The first 4 aren’t that bleak, in fact, they could be interpreted as positive e.g. a lacquered guitar, walking quietly.
But crying only for itself?
That’s both tragic and pitiful.
The nothing is pitiful.
Pathetic.
To exist so long and bring only this level of misery?
+
‘The nothing’ is inexorable?
I don’t know.
Coming after ‘I MAKE LISTS’ and ‘CENTER,’ ‘THE NOTHING’ feels like a reality check as to who Danika’s mom was, but also an unreality check in the sense that there was something else there all along, infecting her, bringing horror in the guise of ‘there’s nothing you could’ve done about any of this and what’s the point anyway?’
A nihilist section, literally?
+
+
This section [‘PHANTOM THREAD’] as counter to ‘THE NOTHING.’
Her own body is a lost cause to herself and an aspect of that has passed via phantom thread to Danika.
Yet:
+
+
Empathy has been heightened when seeing other abuse victims.
Activated?
It’s hard to gauge as the rest of Ablation paints the mother figure as trapped in her own black galaxy, either staying just above water with her kids or filtering her trauma onto them in varying doses.
The brother cuts himself and she knows exactly what to do, how to comfort them, protect them.
+
‘Some small shade in me still yearns to be sick, because it’s the only time I feel worthy of being cared for.’
+
There’s some abyss-deep pathos in this.
My mum would always feel the most caring the day after she’d put me and my sisters through the routine again.
She didn’t have to.
It wasn’t her fault, it was her mind [trapped in that black galaxy].
But it still happened.
+
+
On one hand, the ‘routine’ sounds quite comical, and it was at times, when you stopped to look at the newspaper being slowly rolled up off the carpet, but then one of us would do something wrong and it would become insane, terrifying, cos we never knew what this level of insanity was capable of.
I still care more for my mum than I do for my dad.
At least she was there.
How did she have the mental strength to survive all that?
How did Danika’s mom?
+
+
A mix of memories, all feeding into the other.
Domestic abuse, Danika’s kid accidentally hitting her on the neck, family death, black swallowtails.
It’s not clear which is leading to which, but it starts with the black swallowtail on a ditch flower so it’s probably that.
The river is familiar and the black swallowtail is not.
Poetics meshed with grisly minutiae.
+
+
Not an attempt to understand her mother but a flow of memory.
Grounded in Danika’s daughter and the swallowtail.
‘Are you happy?’
She will be if she can ride out this broken glass table scene. Or think about it so long that the consequences become just a thing that happened once.
+
‘The river rolls its stone into kettles ׀ Stone carves the kettles.’
+
Two different agents of action-image.
The river is Danika’s mom [obviously], the stone is Danika, and the kettles are her daughter.
Who is the main influencer?
Can the stone defy the river that rolled it?
Thinking about it, maybe the ‘river-as-agent’ is a fatalist viewpoint and the ‘stone-as-agent’ is ‘fuck you, river, I’ve got some say here too.’
+
+
I’m running out of paper in my notebook.
+
‘If you can’t bear to cut the children in half, let the children decide where to halve themselves.’
+
There’s a letter on the adjacent page, and the page on the left is the only one in this section.
I might as well put the letter up:
+
+
My mum and dad separated when I was five.
Can’t remember much of that time either.
I never had to write a letter.
My dad willingly [happily?] let go.
He had his boats to work on.
+
‘You keep a letter I don’t remember writing. You keep a letter in which I pledge fealty to stability. The choice lanced a wound in my side, a gash unsubsiding.’
+
Feels sad that the mom held onto this.
Was there a punishment for this choice?
Self-reflection?
+
+
A section of mostly standalone lines and a strong rebuke of/to ‘the nothing.’
This time ‘I’ is the starter.
And when it’s not ‘I’, it’s ‘me’ or ‘my.’
+
+
There’s a destructive vs. restorative vibe to this.
Maybe not even ‘vs.’
Both have been accepted into the fold that is Danika’s poetic psyche.
[Psyche with a lute-playing Viking? – a guest not qualifier of the entire construct]
+
‘If the text must be corporeal, I must insist on its being vaginal. Relentless.’
+
I didn’t really think about it much up to this point, but the father that she “chose” to live with in the previous section is almost nowhere to be seen in this book.
Maybe Ablation 2 will deal with him?
I don’t know.
But I doubt it.
[Not vaginal enough].
+
How much of ‘RELENTLESS’ is real, how much is conjured into nearly-real?
+
+
Everything is garbage.
Seems like Danika’s mom is on her last legs.
No longer resembles a horse [in a soft way].
The childhood house is gone?
+
Neither Danika or her mom are happy about this situation.
There is no attempt to analyse.
That’s refreshing.
The analysis is her mom hated that window pane that she punched through. Or she hated what was lying just beyond it.
Danika hates birthday parties.
And malls.
And TV.
For being there while she was hating things generally.
+
+
I think what this section is trying to tell us is that there’s something in the grass in Costa Rica and, if you don’t know Spanish, riding a horse might be easier.
Or it could be a metaphor.
+
Speaking of metaphor, haven’t seen my old friend glacier in a while.
Did Danika stop feeling like one?
Or was it about grief in general?
Ablation shifted at some point away from the more abstract parts to real [and difficult] childhood experiences/memories.
That’s what I feel after not having read the first half of the book for two weeks.
There’s still poetics/lyricism, and now a horse metaphor [cos her mom was soft like a horse previously?], but it hits as much more affecting, especially the way it’s been laid out.
‘CENTER’ and then ‘THE NOTHING’ and then ‘PHANTOM THREAD’ and then ‘RELENTLESS,’ it all adds up to a mom who is depressingly similar in a lot of ways to my own [though the details vary].
+
+
‘the actual heart is an ugly machine
it doesn’t stir the heart like a true wild rose.’
+
It is strange how the heart became the centre-abstract for love + empathy in the West when it’s as mundane as it comes in both form and function.
The mind is obviously the thing
To catch the conscience of the king
But the brain looks like a lump of grey
Mush
And so does the heart really.
+
Why the repetition of ‘heart’?
It’s in every line of this section.
Cos it holds love and hurt?
Cos it cause the death of Danika’s mom and, at some point, may cause the death of herself too.
It will fail her eventually.
But until then it has so many tasks to deal with, including grief and darkness and love and the nothing with a never-burnt-out cigarette.
+
If this is a true cento, who are the quoted authors?
I’ve checked the notes at the end, and it appears to be a combination of all known artists from the last 600 years of world history. Plus George Harrison.
The arrangement of the quotes works well, and, interestingly, doesn’t directly refer to the ‘love’ aspect of the heart.
Makes it feel sort of like a burden.
[Cos the mind is where the love is!]
+
[The notes to ‘THE NOTHING’ section also say that Danika’s brother came up with one of the lines, so I may have to retract my way-earlier comment that ‘normal people don’t speak like that i.e. lyrical/poetic.’ I guess I haven’t been hanging around enough artist-types.]
+
The final ‘FIELD’, the final section, and clearly an eavesdropper on my previous thoughts as the glacier is back.
And so is entropy.
And horror.
+
+
It’s relentless.
Sandstone, the town where her mom ‘left her body’ is written as a nightmare-construct where stone from the rusted river-bed made the buildings and children got cooked to death in metal barrels during the Great Hinckley Fire.
I’m not sure what I’m being left with here.
It’s like the anti-hope version of Gas, Food Lodging where, actually, the boyfriend died in a cave-in while fucking the town bully, and never loved Ione Skye anyway.
Maybe the last line is the key?
Calling the operator, getting connected and still getting her dime back.
Danika survived all this
survived Sandstone
and so did her mom
who Danika also survived
and loved
other wise she wouldn’t have written such a beautiful book. And I wouldn’t have written such an exhaustive de-con-struc. That only Danika will get anything out of. Same with every author/book I’ve done. This is a perverse gift from and for both of us. No one will ever engage with Ablation the way I have. No book will wrench things about my mother out of me like this one. Maybe my own, one day. I doubt it.
+
‘The Dairy Queen moved to the freeway, became a hair salon my mom nicknamed The Hairy Queen, and then nothing.’
+
Nice line.
Humorous mum.
+++
Ablation is, I think, on its second print run and should be available over at 11:11 Press. Prepare to be dazzled by the blue on the cover.
PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 