Current Reading
Antenna Doubling
Skin Telling
My former partner told me I was more traumatized than I realized.
People wince when I tell that story. The first thing I hear is wow, people will say anything, like the sentence was cruel. But I respect them for it. My skin would flare to the touch and I had no idea. I was unknowingly walking around in a prickly body. Like having a booger and nobody says anything, the whole room agreeing to let your humiliation thrive. How embarrassing. And how kind, finally, to have the thing I could not see myself mirrored.
Everyone in my field of work starts at the mouth. Find your voice, they say, as if the voice were a lost object you find once you stop looking for it. But you cannot mouth off what you have not first sorted. The mouth tells on the root, and the root is the trunk if the ears are the leaves. So the practice begins at the fleshy half-circle door.
Enter here to then carbonate in the belly, where the signal simmers and cooks into something that feels complete like the urge to move a bowel, a form you can stand behind. And only then does it scale back up and out the mouth refined. Most people with a platform tell you to climb a performance ladder, but I am signaling you toward descent.
Chord Collecting
Creative arts therapy, two years shy of a decade ago, where I held my first guitar and my only childhood in the same two hands. G, C, F. I committed those three chords to memory, plucking them in every early song, tuning the guitar and my body at the exact same time. Strumming a backlog of tears freed up some storage space on my hard drive.
Since I am selling precision, here it is. My then-therapist, trained to read clients’ currents, made the act of reading another a method of reflective warmth. Like the way you feel sunlight on the other side of an icy thing. Not meant for trauma to leave the body, but for wounds to soften into plushier scabs, no longer rooms in homes to live in but weather to forecast. Once my wounds cracked into readable currents, I stopped gossiping about other people, clearing the channel another notch.
What does it sound like in there, when sores change and there is space enough to narrate yourself? Can you tell the difference between your signal and the static of others?
Radio Broadcasting
A receiver is not porous. It runs a frequency of its own until it catches something moving through the air. What gets heard is a third sound where the two waves meet. Without inner tuning, there is no way to know which frequency to match. For as long as the song lasts, we take its shape. In the same way we are each other’s keepers, we are each other’s receivers. None of us can hear ourselves clean on our own. The ear is a community organ. Which is why oral histories last generations.
That is not to say we have no oscillator agency. We tune toward the collective station without becoming it. The difference between picking up each other’s signal and speaking each other’s tongue is getting lost fast. A scroll is a billion receivers with their oscillators switched off, code-switching the same carrier down the line, rerunning a broadcast they did not tune against.
A receiver running no frequency of its own is a plagiarist.
Dibia Dabbling
There is a figure in my line who split this whole circuit with her body. Area Scatter, Igbo, Imo State, southeast Nigeria, who before the war was a civil servant. She went into the bush at the end of the fighting and stayed seven months and seven days.
She came back adorned, carrying a thumb piano and songs she said the gods put in her, a dibia now, which is to say one who reads what the rest of the community cannot yet hear. She did not come back louder. She came back more resonant. That is the part this era cannot abide.
Tracking your thoughts for a week will not make you a dibia. The descent Area took has no syllabus and I would not sell you one. What I can tell you is that almost nothing of her survives now. A single clip, some album art, and a name that means one who comes to scatter a place. All of it more potent in the scarcity.
The feed wants you searchable, averaged, fully captured. The oldest organ in the diaspora hears the light-speed of the cosmos and the crunch of soil. I am downstream of those ears. So are you.
Signal Doubling
Everyone is talking about co-regulation. Nervous systems finding their resting heart rate in each other, the weight of bodies an anchor. Do not get me wrong. Shit slaps. But co-regulation soothes, and I am itching for something sharper. Call it co-perception.
I am five years into therapy when I marry someone who perceives through their throat and listens at heart level. Turns out therapy was rehearsal. Marriage is the field. Applied science, so to speak. Everything I learned about receiving my own signal in private has become second-level listening, out loud, in the open, with another instrument tuning near mine. The things that live underneath language, they meet me down there.
But do not forget, double signal means double exposure. When you tune in partnership, the option to mishear yourself is no longer on the table. I used to be a flinch magnet. Now there is a witness to my static. Scabs ache in company. Co-regulation lets us settle there, but co-perception will not let us lie. A tougher gift, hearing yourself loud and clear through the perception love offers. It is the cost of perceiving together.
Current Reading
The era wants you producing, so much so that you can no longer separate your labor from your body. Can you imagine? A mouth running with no ear behind it and no gut beneath it. A floating mouth with no system. It is not even that machines sound like us. It is us giving up frequency to match an average.
The descent is a dive down through the throat system, into bodies particular enough to hone frequency. The currents worth reading are not out there in the field. They are over here. In you. In your lover. In your ancestors. In the ones you hold close.
So start here. Under what conditions do you listen most freely?
If you don’t want to listen, you don’t want to perceive from the depths of you. And that is okay. But mouthing off was always more than a vocal practice. You know that now.
Past here is a living prompt called Source Sorting.
