Time, form, line. I was intent on touching a time before time and in the future, love. Cosmic love. So radiant I thought it might finally reveal to me the secret inside, a dilation opening toward forever and beyond. I have been looking for that magic in my life, all my life. Desire in language, communicating always “If…” If we begin, if we survive. Seven years later, I emerged transformed knowing that I was not born of time, but instead fashioned from its core. Now I’m alive, called forth by the form of things unknown.
Lara Mimosa Montes, from Seven Years, Kirlian photograph, 2021.
In January, I photograph the hands in order to change the flow— to document this force, this anagrammatical coming to. In Esogetic medicine, the Kirlian is beautiful because it captures Being as this reactive zone of possibility and rigidity. We are a polyvagal people, whose biology, and mechanometabolic awareness is modulated by light, and touch. To study this light, through the Kirlian, is to explore who we are, and where we are, in time, and in trauma... the way we block our own light even as our Being, our bodies, are oriented, on a cellular level, toward transformation. Why resist? This coordinated, intelligent, quantum swarm is us. Still, I am fearful of our capacity to change in response to the unknown. I’m not talking about adaptation (or The Body Keeps Score). I am talking about cellular reorganization. Soul repair. To recall the words of Ida Rolf, “At the present state of our knowledge, it would be highly arbitrary to assign a limit to this change, either in respect to structure or time.” So in the white notebook, I write: “Let go of the notion that you are standing on fixed ground…Can you let go. Can you lay down...”
This is the novel of the future. The writing I have not dared to write. I have been calling this work a novel because of the way I imagine it relates to itself, like the fascia— it uses stigmergic communication, and is inspired by Lisa Robertson’s observation that “Color, like a hormone, acts across, embarrasses, seduces. It stimulates the juicy interval in which emotion and sentiment twist.” It knows everything we have ever felt (even when we refuse to feel). Unlike the poem, its duration is not the instant, and its time is not our time. Perhaps the novel occupies one time and I another. Or maybe I have already collided with it. More than likely, I am encountering it now without my knowledge (as Anne Dufourmantelle writes, “All misrecognition is future.”)
Lara Mimosa Montes, from Seven Years, Esogetic template, 2021.
I have reservations about entering the space that is writing again too soon. Swerves in awareness never feel casual, and I don’t think it matters in what genre we come to know them. If you are a writer, you know there is the time between writing, and then, writing. Sometimes these periods are indistinguishable from one another (the largesse of my depressions does not render me more alive when I am writing, nor am I in my element when lost in language). Am I ready to invite in a new consciousness? Some combination of dream and desire carries me forward. I’m skeptical of the possibility that there is any continuity between I have written and I write; or I am and I was. When Being feels like an accident: You were at the right place at the wrong time. Or Instinct, drive: Where else? Who else? In pursuit of what other mad life?