In return, Makeda, Queen of Sheba, offered this riddle, itself embedded in another one, and so on. “Thus, you chose to amble like a botheration amongst our fears, letting us dance, shiver, tear each other, escape and recreate. Tell us, what do you know about survival? Is it wisdom or trial that touched you and will eventually drag you home?”

Having to write on a morning released in dew and confusion, I was sent against my own demand, and she was gone. “Jenny Lin’s procession don’t need my words.” I repeated this line of refusal at least seven times in my house, in the car, at my dogs, until I chose to rebel against linguistics later on.

Again, already, I thought how I didn’t want to form a sentence, let alone write a text, but softly reset this penchant somewhat pre-enunciated in the body, well, because of Jenny, thanks to Jenny, I fear not to say with a heartbreak out (of) the body, the body out, unremitting spiraling out (of the body that has to give itself away), as we, desperately digging, tilling, and searching for it in this lump of hieroglyphs, find ourselves trying to repair our forms of feeling with.

What could be transcribed as a communal, schizophonic arrangement in the music where I live is also known to be a throat-cutting industry. What matters more, even more than your point, is what gets in the way of your line. “Go on. Break the news.” 

So was the theme (a longing without a receiving end), if not a hue, that resonated with me for a while. As part of my desire to scrape and fill without content, I began to investigate the possible evocations of these wind-fields where I fell when I looked at Jenny’s drawings. Writing to this mood in the language of my wings, nothing too specific came into focus. Water drop, spider, dog face, hallway, doorknob, staircase, your demeure and my ashes… Where could I possibly land?

The opening line of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul began to hammer: “Das Glück Ist Nicht Immer Lustig” (Happiness is not always fun). Without thinking, I took a picture, becoming aware only days later that the feeling had already fled from whatever caged or tried to cage it. Something about the “not always”, this tear produced in the sequence in elliptical or quasi-elliptical fashion robbed the enthusiasm I cherished so much.

What happens when you try to hold a spirit in captivity? What goes on while you tense your muscles to efface the dissonance within a thought? “Haha. You keep wanting to slap the tyrant with the back of your hand”, unable to resist Sydney Poitier’s insurrection in In the Heat of the Night. Just when I thought I succeeded to domesticate the jenny-feelings, and the intensities, well, the chromaticism of these dreams curling their way back to the Mississauga field, I found feathers of many different colours and sizes pillowing my right arm, making it inconceivable to reproduce the fantasy in pure form. I migrated miles away from my proper name with a writing machine I made up with the detritus of your trace, shredding. Well…

To Jenny, I offered this as a preamble: “Somewhere towards the end of Those Artificial Moons I saw that two is also three, in concrescence (…) Did the blackness of your hand suddenly decide to erode what it had previously uncovered?” If only there was some fact, somebody to be found intact within. As anticipated, the preliminary (wannabe body) outgrew itself with her reply: “Rip and give yourself back”. That, I kept turning over and over in my hands, just as I looked at the nights she and I drew in. “How much did the tides have to prepare to make these fractals look so unprepared?”

But if you could feel the hands drawn in this sorrow… “In this, sorrow” she echoed. The fact of nothing being whole within bespoke the chances we all face, thrusting in one another, in this we are, half-smile projectiles, desiring no scale to control our speed… within within within.