I’m passing exams and doing homework, sure. I’m still in Ayurveda school, okay sure. I still hold all my metaphysical concerns about illness and health, great. I read a novel yesterday instead of studying or working on my overdue book chapter about Vatarakta, The Wind Corrupting The Blood, for the upcoming Art.Earth books collection: The Breath we Share: embodied and creative practices for a living and dying world.
I read Ursula K LeGuin’s fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu. It’s the culmination of her sword-and-sorcery fantasy series, and it centers around the human/dragon relationship, taking a slow, peasantry-focused look at magic and being in dialogue with childhood abuse and disability. It’s beautiful, but boring by SF/F standards. I took the whole day to read it. From morning to right before I went to bed, I read the whole thing. I didn’t pick up a textbook. I went to a café and had a Sencha, and later I went to the public library with my TCM herbal decoction in a thermos. I wrote a letter to my lover who lives on the other side of the continent. I didn’t try to do anything productive. I nursed my cold, blew my nose, tended my clogged-up sinuses. I felt great, actually. I felt more like myself at the end of that day, than in all of the days in which I’m trying to perform learning expertise, personal growth, becoming something, becoming productive for you to read me on your screen somewhere, wherever you are. Who are you?
If you’ve been reading me either for 2 weeks or 7 years, why? No, seriously. Why? I want to know. Is it because you I feel like there’s some thing to learn here? Is it because you find my story of relapse and remission to be interesting, inspiring, engaging in some way? Aren’t you tired of online content yet? I mean, what are we even doing here? Like, right now I’m writing this blog post by recording a voice note over lunch, as I take a break from listening to a conversation about Samuel R. Delany and his sex life, which is his writerly life, and I wonder about whether it’s possible for anything you and I do or say to ever actually be transgressive. And now I’m editing it before I hit the blue Continue button to publish this to Substack’s US-based data-centers and engage the SMTP protocol that will deliver it to your email client wherever you are.
Look, if all we’re doing here is reiterating the status quo, in which you and I are considering ourselves to be sick, and need to strive towards being healthy in order to be valuable as human beings, then we should just stop.
If you’re reading me in order to, like, be inspired so that you can feel better about yourself because of some external source, you should probably email me and introduce yourself, or unsubscribe. If my take on the systemic context of the human body is interesting to you, then let’s talk about it.
But if what I’m doing is ultimately just like contributing to the capitalist machine’s ongoing extraction of the blood of the earth, then I should just stop as well. I was using AI for a while, and I still am, because I don’t want to fill my head with administrative drudgery, but If I let the machine think for me, or diagnose for me, or read for me, or synthesize for me, then I’m at a loss. I’m lost. So this blog is has become a lot looser. This blog is is not a well-constructed set of thoughts anymore. This blog is not advancing some argument anymore. I’m really actually just talking to you now because there’s nothing else we can do anymore but try to talk to each other. Try to get some semblance of human voice across this screen. And I would much rather you email me and say, hey Laure, I want to talk to you. And you don’t have to pay me. I would appreciate it if you do. But if you can’t, then I still am open to talking to you. That’s it. That’s what I had to say today.