I’m the key and the lock. I can barely breath as the walls are caving in and I must act fast to open myself. I’m told I’m only one who can find a path but I’m only allowed to move my fingers and have to squint my eyes so that nobody sees what I’m really looking at. I’m looking for a way out, so you know.
But I’m kept firmly behind horizontal bars of organised letters and confronted only by people who know more than I do about what I’m doing. Allowing oneself to be taught, calls for a strong trust to someone who you don’t know. Teaching is about teaching others to trust an unknown.
The bars in front of me tell me that nothing makes sense makes sense. The aim is that people write their own story out of it and discover themselves. Noise is here for us to situate ourselves as ourselves, so that we don’t confuse ourselves to be a choir. But the more situated I become, the more I only hear me.
I keep oriented by remembering that the first thing ever written was a job application. It didn’t include a CV because there hadn’t been any careers yet. I don’t know what the job was. Possibly a middle-management task, like counting stuff. More people were hired as the company expanded, which is how literature was born.
It took a while but eventually literature became very sophisticated and today most of us write receipts. I write receipts because I don’t understand what people are saying. I write it down to figure it out. It’s material, sums and tokens.
Today I got triggered by a tw. It made me feel white, male and privileged. The warning was about what white men in power do. I’m such but something else too. I must be something else then a receipt of my genes.
Later on, a person in a group I work for invited us to confront the patriarchal structures of language. They of course are not talking to me but I feel responsible somehow. So, I intentionally speak less than others only to not come off as dominant. But I fear my silence is speaking too much. Where can we go from here?
Honestly, I don’t really work in the group but my presence is needed for work to exist.