the object of this investigation is subject to occlusion
Hidden behind a clinical drop tile ceiling
Or scrubbed away like stars out of a city sky.

Its symptom is a sense of strangeness
Not disorientation, no, the ground of intelligibility isn’t lost, mundanity doesn’tt disappear
It’s just that the occlusion parts
Gaps open in the body of a shadow puppet
A mechanism of projection suggests itself
The mundane is flooded with the supra-mundane
Always is, always has been, but now you see it
And now you don’t.

The author is biased by humanity
Simian Self-involvement, mammalian desires
Oral, anal, genital fascinations
She sees relative and conditioned phenomena
As absolute, acausal, and enduring.
She is generally blind to the ground of her being.

she is frustrated, tremendously frustrated, with all these limitations
With her body, her desires, her soul and its alchemical capacities
her soul and its occlusions
She struggles to delineate her person
And personhood becomes her prison

Drop tiles rot and fall to the floor
Latex paint lifts away from cinderblock walls
And still she builds
She builds and still
She imagines the walls demolished
She imagines the prison disintegrating and she pins that image in place
white hot and trembling with libido

Outside the walls of occlusion the sky is soaked in strangeness.

She has called this strangeness fear
But fear isn’t the right word.
She has named it the blank sky feeling, the glimpse of something, the intimation, the alien geometry, the makyou, the fear of god.
She has called it derealization, a clinical word, a straitjacketing word, that comes paired with its twin, depersonalization.

But the rupture of the person is an alluring promise. And that promise speaks the language of strangeness.

Strangeness catalyzed the author’s first forays of expression
For it was in the wilderness of childhood that they first met
She embodied strangeness in song and dance
Dissonant, arrhythmic, repetitious melodies
And nonsense words.
This was the character of strangeness:
Disjointed. disjointing. Fragmentary. Fragmenting.

When reason dawned she asked herself
What is the meaning of my nonsense?
Does it have a purpose?
Does it have power?
and what is this strangeness?
Should it be enjoyed?
Should it be feared?
Is it natural? Is it holy?
Is it a symptom of my disease?
Can I hold it? Can I seek it out?
Will it answer my desires?

She thirsts for fresh thoughts.
Frustration forced her to find the door.
Frustrated, she gropes for the handle
Frustrated, she throws it open
Frustrated by what she sees, she slams it shut
But the door won’t close.
The door will never close again.