(Try) to See
Article & Art by Lucy Kramer
Lucidity
At the same time that it disintegrates, the boy is pulling into his lungs. You might also be looking at his half-closed eyes, or his hands wrapped around the filter. You might be looking at the dinner table where I wait for our tuk-tuk back over the bridge, away. You might be seeing this as the last of four days, as the piece attached to years and years. Can you understand that together? You try to see into a face you recognize for all of the time we’ve known. Trying to see into all of the unknown time.
Do you see the red-hot-burning-end of the last cigarette?
Lucidity
Notes: Call with Grandma Oct 8, 2023
My grandma has two shelves of craft materials in the living room, alongside Fox News and grandpa’s coffee steam. She is organizing the bins, getting rid of whatever she has not used in a year. She knows each color of paper, each stamp, each glue stick. Five months, a week, two days since last touched. The shelf is sitting in the middle of this room they stay in. She knows where to find everything // in here. Have you seen the room? It’s not in the closet anymore—Grandpa ordered new shelves, we repainted—everything white. Lucidity, she says, is to be functional. She begins working on my birthday card–a vest with my name on it—several weeks before July 18th. “So I can grasp exactly what I want to do. It’s like click click click; oh then I’ll do this, oh I’ll do this. I’m jealous of the people who know what they want to do at the beginning.” I open the card. Inside, there are cut-out paper objects in the pockets—a passport, a pencil, my book, a map of the world.
Lucidity
“I would have never thought of that word, but it’s perfect. For both of you. I would never think of him seeing there were no eggs, thinking that he needed to get more, and actually getting them.”
A, (then) B, (then) C, (then)
Lucidity
Gender Troubles are, among many things, the fight for intelligibility—to be seen as a human, or to be known. Judith Butler posits that “the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of “the person” is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined.”
I, the “person,” exist only through the ill-fitting clothing of tightly-aligned categories. Woman. Pre-recognized categories. Through these clothes, I recognize myself as I see others recognizing me. And yet, despite our best attempts, we fuck up at being something intelligible—easily intelligible. Made sense of. First, let’s say-–we already make sense. It is that sense that already exists. What is intelligible to what I am? I don’t want to leave the protection of apprehensibility, but inevitably, accidentally, I do. The chaos is subverting what you are: to become.
Lucidity
In the 1970s, the newly-created work force of young, unmarried Malaysian Muslim women were falling possessed on the floor of American, Japanese, and European factories. They were harassed by their male supervisors. The factory displaces spirits that reside around bodies of water. Those possessed knew this. “Thus, spirit imagery gave symbolic configuration to the workers' fear and protest over social conditions in the factories. However, these inchoate signs of moral and social chaos were routinely recast by management into an idiom of sickness.” Maybe we think of knowing as something that can be said clearly. Sickness, on the other hand, is falling on the floor, screaming. Can’t work. The women // can’t function // to make things. They hold the understanding of chaos. The boss // can’t function // to see the world // he interferes with. He underestimates the potency of a reality he didn’t consider. As the psychologist put it: their “mass hysteria.. ‘psychological aberration’... should be handled ‘like an epidemic disease of biological origin.” A lucidity that cannot be afforded to spread.
Lucidity
Look at the page you are holding. Holding it, touching its edges.
You are in a building. Touch the walls, the teeth of possession screaming out of the land. The landscape became toothed, armed, manufactured. They are measly, held to the ground, attached through concrete stitches. You walk over every day. Feel your feet hit them. Tear them out. Touch the page. See where it is from. See if it resists you.
Lucidity
I have a two-paged google doc. Lauren and Julian in a hotel room on one side, a clouded sky on the other. I print double-sided, and tape it to my window. As the sun comes up, the rectangular shadow of a page hits the other side of my wall. In the morning, in the full sun, the pigment of their gray-scaled bodies cut through the white clouds. Through the night, all that I see is the clouds hanging on my window. I think about the image I left on the other side, what it might look like tomorrow, again. Light cuts them into the same surface, the front and back in the same place. They are nowhere// in the cloud // a page // somewhere real.
Lucidity
“I would go to work, come back, and wait for the next day. It wasn’t that I was sad or upset. I didn’t care about time. It wasn’t the place, because I felt at home also for a few weeks. It wasn’t quite real.
It seems crazy, but your brain is also chemicals. Thank God.”
Lucidity
“We” are negative spaces between electrons. // When we die, it brings her comfort that our parts will become something else. Atoms, organs, systems, breathing in and out (walking to class). We are always around each other. Sometimes, we see each other’s eyes. Two letters–W, E. One syllable in the English language. We take this as our own, living through the word. A collection of “I’s.” The pronoun grammar of “I” and “we” is a signification of an I and We that then exists. The word creates the we. When I speak “we,” the corners of my lips come together, separating when the sound has passed. We are small (clouds). We are big (the particles that make us).
Judith Butler, Gender Troubles, 23.
Aihwa Ong, “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia,” 33.
Aihwa Ong, “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia,” 35.
Dr. P. K. Chew "How to Handle Hysterical Factory Workers" 50, 53.