nighttime dreams
Woke up yesterday at 3:30 am after an evening of drinking and vaping. Could not fall back asleep for a while, had vivid memories of my nighttime dream. I was a black bird first, a crow, in a gameified dialogue. I was asked to redecorate a house for 650 clients. Arguably, an impossible task. Too many clients. I scrolled through my predefined text-answers, but after being through a loop a few times, I accepted the challenge. The screen was divided, the lower third green like grass, the top two thirds blue skies. In the middle was a mound of dirt, freshly dug up, a mole hill of sorts that I would fly through when picking an answer.
The next part of the game/dream had transformed me back into a human form. I was standing on a plane that had a circular hole, 2.5 metres wide. Below that, a little off center, another plane with a hole, and so on, ever-repeating. Holes all the way down. I knew I had to pass through them to get to my challenge but climbing clumsily through a few of them revealed a sisyphusian mechanic, where my climbing would just reload new planes. I finally started jumping through them, letting go of control completely revealed a magic pull, like a gust of wind that would securely take me through the holes without incidents. That is how I cleared this stage of the game/dream. Falling through the holes was exhilarating, freeing. I had to actively focus on relinquishing control to keep the process going smoothly. I think that is very telling of my process. Lessons to be learned from the black crow redecoration nighttime game/dream.
Had to explain to four people today what my project was about in small-talk scenarios. No time for chit chat. At the core is the loss of agency over self-determination. (Subjectivation as in Didier Eribon’s writing) This is a state we can be in because of...
A... a state of post-truth in neural media (neural media as in K.Allado McDowell).
B... a queer identity that is pre-figured by society’s perception of queer identity (even before the subject itself realises their queerness.)
Both of these cases create a feeling of disorientation (as in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology).
Why bread then? Bread is the medium I have chosen to start my investigations. Because it is shaped by its surroundings but not always cooperative or suceptible to that shaping. Further, it has been part of my practice and a family tradition, which ties is to notions of memory and lineage.
Spaces of memory as in queer phenomenology.
I want to find the passage in making of the queer self, where they talk about the decision to either deny queer identity and try and pass as straight or appropriating societal expectations of what a faggot is supposed to act like and pushing it to the extreme - as an act of rebellion.
02/10/2025
Cut cardboard into the 4 views of the house, as well as the floorplan.
Baked at 220°C for about 50min. Was scared of the cardboard catching fire for a while, very smokey situation.
The dough was leavened only with sourdough starter, mixture of pizza flour and whole wheat flour.
Observations:
- The bread did not rise as much as I had anticipated, the cardboard was not really engulfed by the dough.
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Cardboard is quite thick, and doesnt cut very cleanly, granted the procedure was messy due to my only available tool being a beaten down stanley knife.
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Cardboard, against my prediction, is in fact not dry and un-sticky, but very much sticks to the dough - thus the pieces did not come off.
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Neither did they leave any imprints.
- In fact, the floorplan is still lodged in the bread.
There is a certain precarity in excavating memory spaces. In a way they remain the way you picture them and trigger the emotions that you project on them because at one point you (subconciously) decided what parts to remember and how to fit them into your narrative.
In therapy I often felt like I was going digging for problems. Like examining my past would unearth this mess of dark and sad realities I had covered up or forgotten. In a way I am sure it does, the question being how deep you want to go?
I don’t know if a past that has been fully sifted through is even possible? If you go back in time and iron out all the creases and cracks you had covered up, what is the outcome? Are you then magically healed of any inherited trauma and modes of navigating? Or will you never reach the bottom?
After 5 years of not really talking to my parents about my sexuality, the waves had kind of settled, dried down to salty cracks, that were safe to walk on. Not a very fertile ground but a steady one. Digging up the emotions and images from that time was like rewetting the ground, reworking what has been left to dry up.
What if i learn that my parents, two people I had started appreciating more since moving away, were fundamentally bad for me or had tainted my actions and feelings in negative ways?
No one is individually responsible for such a thing, but always acting within their circumstances, within the world an narration they created.
If repeated action, ritual and habit dents the world in ways that proliferate said action, being queer surely is an attempt at making different dents, next to the obvious ones.
I think of the times at my grandmother’s place and for the first time today I got the feeling that maybe my obsession in it is not just rooted in serene, sublime peace and familiality. What if my obsession is pointing towards a convolute of diverse emotion, good and bad? That had somehow burned themselves into my narration. The positive ones I keep harboring, re-enacting her baking bread, tracing her habits to form similar dents. Dents, that maybe I learnt subconsciously I could never quite fill.
Bittersweet is a word that stuck with me today. There is a bittersweet reality in seeing family in action like at my grandmother’s. A very formulaic representation of family - husband, wife, kids, repeat.
I remember knowing I was gay when my grandmother was still alive, but i never told her. She died before i came out to anyone.
This space performed in private, a show I could never pull off fully. There was no space for queer existence there. I am not trying to blame anyone, in part to protect my own serene memory of the space. But I was never in a position to repeat the habits that place showed me, lived out in front of me. I would have to repeat different motions, make my own dents and now that the place is frozen in time, maybe it can keep its beauty because I will never have to be delinieate there, never have to actually feel the discomfort of making new dents by myself?
I think there is something there about observing this oiled clockwork of smooth sailing straight society and how beautifully it ran, but at the same time knowing there is an underbelly to it. Like my frandfather, who I never met but it was communicated to me through indirect comments probably had a drinking problem, and I probably also believe he was not the kindest man.
And on the other side observing this clockwork knowing I do not really fit into it, or could break it by forcing my way in.