Collated newsletters sent over the course of 2020 from Torchlight Artist Jamila Johnson-Small/SERAFINE1369.
Parts I to VI: 10.04.2020 | 7.05.2020 | 3.08.2020 | 2.09.2020 | 20.11.2020 | 22.12.2020
Sending a note out
The full moon stirred (troubled?) something in me
There are many movements
I don’t think I can talk about stillness
balance shifting
strange new intimacies
mouth full of complexities
/ i am not good at videocalls
I’ve been trying since January
but
last year was such a whirlwind of fuckery and movement
pretty mindless and ragged
I’ve been finding it difficult to write
i want to think about the impossibility of beginnings and ending with you
all things impact other things
the complex resonance of images
(following the full moon in Libra, moon trine Neptune, Aries season).
The feeling is that I am full of feelings
and it must be good to open them out,
to open myself out,
internal swirling brings a kind of stagnation
after a while
I think about remedial practices of bloodletting
and what it does to draw lines around things,
as though they can always be separated from the other things
I do not know how to make sense of the things I have seen,
the things that move inside of me.
I feel pieces of me caught vibrating in different patches of time.
I feel multiple.
I wonder does everybody feel like this?
I am angry.
About so much.
I am furious.
crappy data
crappy data
crappy data
: the impacts of white supremacy on black life.
Everything wrong and yet
everything is right
as this is the way it is
and the questions come with the next breath,
with the end of the exhalation –
what will you do now?
WHAT WILL YOU DO NOW?
(What will you do now?)
Taurus season
everything seems to have become
an Audience
too many eyes
and words like darts
flying about all over the place,
reminds me of this dream I used to have
where toy guns would shoot foam pellets
and make holes by boring (in a sailing kind of way, easy)
straight through bodies.
Regularly.
Are we ghosts to receive violence so smoothly?
What is left behind is not smooth.
I put so much energy into sustaining my refusals,
but maybe this doesn’t matter
Maybe I still feel I have something to prove
Maybe I gave up too soon
Maybe I was arrogant and thought that I would shine so furiously that I would be seen for that flame that is both itself and a refusal of terms, alive and living but also ending continually which is it’s living
I remind myself that I cannot correct any of it and none of it needs correcting, only loving. And sometimes forgetting and sometimes crushing and sometimes putting down and walking away.
don’t want to lose sight of those dreams,
those visions
coaxed into present reality through movement.
I call on nothing I have ever seen before.
Each thing an end in itself. And a beginning.
Venus is strong in the sky and I have no time for lack of heart nor lack of conviction.
Rather silence.
Rather space.
Full moon in Scorpio. One of my favourite signs.
wild exposing dancing
let my body be a channel for whatever is there
without judgement
intentions as guidance
but not rule
screen energy dislocation gets me
zoom disorientation headache…
but I love that you are doing things
Full moon in Aquarius. Moon opposition with Saturn. Leo season (my season):
Last Yearz Interesting Negro is dead.
New artist name: SERAFINE1369
full moon
observations
(fragmentsnotesquotesdreams)
Recognising maps in unlikely places
She kicks what looks like a clear rose quartz crystal and swipes some lip balm over a split inlay in the rock and says that’s all she has to give and gives it to me.
for a long, long time I’ve
been wearing this other planet like a scar on me.*
I felt no distinction between any limbs or directions.
God moments.
Omg I am just out of a dream where I spit out the front of my own tongue on a bus, it was covered in phlegm, I had bitten it off in the night or something but not realised
Why do we have to go into the space all the time ? We are already there.
(the somatic body wants to always be somewhere else)
I pour bleach powder and water on the faces of the male aliens who have captured me and kill me elaborately by making me perform in some twisted game. They are entirely white like milk sweets.
4 nonviolrnce to work uur opponent must have acosncisine e**
In my dream there is a statement that gets released by a governmental body when hair gets relaxed and an apology is issued for the impacts of racism.
internal (body) community
aesthetic unease
I know at one point I wanted and was left wanting.
I know at several points, we shared in spirit breaking.***
Each chest torso of the hydra is deformed
It is not an investigation of the complexities of the gaze, or of transforming or manipulating myself as subject of the gaze, but an attempt to have a relationship with myself whilst being visible to others.
[…]
finding connections, consulting the oracle, listening to the prophets, re-scribing the myths, listening without language
* Fred Moten
** Stokely Carmichael [spelling from my notes]
–
something teenage about this time
a transition period
–
(Fragment from An Elaborate System of Pink Wires): Mirror hours have been stalking me for the last while. It’s good to think about colonial time as symbols beyond bosses of my body, as things that might want to touch and communicate rather than control me, things that might recognise my subjectivity, see me. Everything is a messenger of some kind. 555 opens my eyes and tells me to look at those dreams. It’s been a pattern. Did I literally dream of my own scratched and bleeding heart? Scratched but not broken.
I have started to understand some thing about prayer.
Anne Carson is writing about Sappho and the ekstasis of love –
love dares itself to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty
and I am busy trying to learn how to set boundaries and feel my own edges so that I can hold myself so that I don’t leave myself behind…
Life cycles. The geometry of feeling like a constantly shifting cartography I see in my head, I tattoo on my body. No line is straight.
A wish for presence and an acceptance of absence that vibrates with intention and strategies for welcoming and witnessing forms of presence, that asks for the recognition of other signals, other signs, other modes of communication that gives voice to what, or who, has been exiled…Asks for an opening, for bodies to open themselves to becoming vessel. Nothing ever really goes away. This is ghost work.
Full moon in Pisces. Moon conjunct Neptune. Virgo season:
I am hit by menstruation so hard
that a tiny part of me believes
I must be some kind of god
to survive the brutality of it.
I remember reading
that the gods
used to be
the names and narratives
given to voices
in people’s heads
before some part of the brain
evolved
and connected to itself.
Waxing crescent moon in Aquarius, square Uranus and Mercury. Scorpio season:
“everything matters because everything hurts someone somewhere as it is mattering”
from Camisado, CA Conrad
it’s been raining pretty much incessantly in london and this makes quite a landscape for thinking a rhythmic sort of sensitised thinking which is sometimes a not thinking mind feels thick with activity dense threads of thought and lines of feeling trying to not give space to dread anymore this feels important and if some things have to go then this definitely should be one of them thinking about openings energetic geometries the magic of the time before after and during the sun setting the dream messages coming through:
My enemies lived their lives beside me taking what they wanted and disregarding the needs and desires of the rest of us. I say enemies because they became my enemies through the disregard and the exploitation of proximity (to me); we had not always been enemies, and this positioning was not my choice.
followingSaturnandJupiterconjunctioninAquariusMooninAriesandtrineVenusCapricornseason:
(In face of being overcome,)
I lost all my words
and became only feeling
This was one of the sentiments that opened this year for me – forcing a necessary listening that became it’s own vibration and I realised (remembered) that listening can also be a voice, set a tone, offer a frequency, be a movement, an action in itself;
every gesture, movement or non-movement is a voice and Everything is speaking.
Cycles and fragmentary returns.
This morning, Francesca Lisette:
“a sense that voice is somehow an easy way to access embodiment”
Something we all perhaps know better, moving through this year and trying to maintain connection, feel others…which circles back to feeling oneself (a resonating chamber).
I want to open all the windows and the doors
“That sound, when felt in the body is a conductor, can be a map”
Anything can be a map.
My eyes see lines and constellations and an unfolding grid that seems sacred and unholy at once.
I listened to Dionne Brand who was saying,
“I am turning into the something missing necessary to live”
or this is, at least, what I heard, and what I keep.
Paris Cian said:
“in order to arrive there, I truly believe we have to go in the dark”
Beverley Glenn-Copeland sings:
“like a beacon in the night”
Sending out notes, extending psychic limbs to you…
SERAFINE1369
2020