Ghost Losses & Bodily Gains
Queer feminist life-writing as attempted intimacy & documents of the American road trip round II
Intro
“I write to you in disorder, I well know. But that is how I live”
Clarice Lispector
I’ve been thinking about what it is to write your life. I saw this meme, and it said “don’t fuck with writers, we will describe you”. I also am thinking of this quote by the wonderful and bold Jackie Wang “the gift of the word has been given to women who are not afraid of the rapture of turning themselves inside out.”
When the internet was youngish (2002 - 2006 by my personal measure) people started blogging. Scribing their lives publicly, bearing, sharing and documenting all “The blogger in all her mania and unapologetic joy” (Wang, 2023, p.375). Tumblr was and is key, and now we have this writerly longer form place (Substack).
In the same line of thought I think of 19 year old Jennifer Ringley, who turned her webcam to film her day to day life in her college dorm; also a form of scribing life and choosing to share with strangers; unknown publics.
Stills from Jennifer Ringley’s Jennicam, 1996
I have just finished reading Jackie Wang Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun and Vera Blossom’s How to Fuck Like A Girl, both swirling, embodied, fuck it and fuck it up energy laden documents of messy, late-capitalist infused, queer lived experience.
In reading them, I experience intimacy; the processes of rubbing up against the nuance, tricks, agony, desire, sadness, defiance, knowledge and intrigue of other body-minds in detailed techni-colour. I still think writing and reading is an act of attempted intimacy. And when it works, the reader and writer are closer still.
In these last few weeks, I have been feeling the long tail of deep loss. A feeling not new to me; but pervasive and continual throughout my life, a register that seems the place I often end up; not by choice, but back at that old station. I think this emotional state may be rooted in having an absent father; one from the beginning who chose not to choose me. Perhaps also, the complex family trauma I carry from the ones who lived and infused bloodlines before me. Perhaps, because I am porous, and we are all watching the world burn around us, and at once, attempting, rehearsing and refining personal strategies of deflection, side-stepping, French exits and incantations, ongoing ritual attempts at survival. It’s exhausting and seemingly endless.
“She says, I am here, and I believe her. She makes herself here by saying, Here I am. Hear me, how I come in to the moment by announcing it. Is it Persephone? Or is it the statue of Peplophoros with her head lopped off? Observe how the headless woman watches the garden without a face You feel the auric force of her body. Just as you hear the laugh of a woman echo in the atrium, you read “a laugh resounds, creeps, ricochets, coughs, floats.” (Wang, 2023, p.350)
Street Rain Pounding
Observations from NYC. May 2025
I arrived into a city of Grey rain. I got a taxi, paid for by Randy to get from JFK to their flat in midtown. I was knackered and grumpy and hoping that ramming my senses full of the intensity and rough excessive charm of NYC would help dampen my long and ongoing sense of loss and grief; states riding high in me since December, and as it turns out, not so easy to turn or tone down.
I arrived in the early evening, to an empty flat. Put my stuff down, had a shower and went out to meet Oskar at The Public, and then onto the Cubbyhole bar. To find my fellow queers. Walking down from 38th to East Village in the dark, damp night was engulfing. Steam rising from the manholes, wet sloppy footsteps, and movement everywhere; alongside, underneath and overhead. A stillness found in the frenetic excess, in the fatigue of long travel, and being spat out into a teeming, crawling, stinking, sparkling urban environment.
As soon as I stepped out of the posh flat, my roving and wondering mind was totally captivated by the sensory excess of dark NY streets. The intensity of the stimulus of the city, and its capacity to temporarily block my sadness made me feel good. I felt optimistic. Perhaps on this trip, I might be able to rewire my brain away from the sadness I’ve been feeling pervasively of late; the silent yet resounding lack of x in my life and shitty stuff at play within my tiny family.
Maybe a high octane, super-size me dose of America, alongside sniffing out my paternal absent America line, might bring some respite from the tight grip of a dull ache that has been consuming me, and subsuming me, for what feels way too long now.
Everything Goes Dark A Little Further Down
Ghost Losses
Mood. a distinctive emotional quality or character; a prevailing emotional tone or general attitude; a frame of mind disposed or receptive, as to some activity or thing. I have been living within a very strange mood, for the first five months of the year.
I have changed so much in my life, wilfully, reaping great rewards, and at times, complex ambivalences and some time in dark peat shit holes. I have left my house, my day-to-day life in Machynlleth. I have ended a job and started another; I have ended a profound relationship with someone.
And yes, I chose that intensity; yes, I leant into it. I fed it. I loved it. I egged it on. I too, take responsibility for building an intimacy / connection gain on steroids, whose loss, casts an impossible shadow to outrun.
I have been running. Running and running. Dismantling and re-assembling my life. And for that I feel glad; relief; relieved; bolstered. And yet, and yet. What is this feeling I can’t shake easily? It is the long shadow of loss. And the particular loss that was underscored and calcified in December, has, I realize, activated multiple chains of ghost losses.
These ghost losses are a palimpsest haunting. My body is a haunted house, and there are no windows. It is as if a current rupture activates old, deep, established losses and absences. It has been unusually hot this spring and early summer; yet it has also been a body season of haunting and sticky staccato peat bog paradox.
The strength of my desire to consume life, to turn the volume up, to build new and stronger / softer connections with my kin, friends old and new and community, directly proportional to the feeling of loss that runs through my nervous system.
I am trying all methods and tools at my disposal to dampen this feeling. Running to fill the gap with no holds barred. To fill a dull ache with dry heat. To shine light into the shadow. To loosen the grip of sadness and loss, with as much life as I can possibly summon.
I’m not entirely convinced this is the most effective strategy with which to perform an exorcism of visceral / sexual / queer / creative / intellectual / classed knotted and knotting, but I have tried retreat into shadow, and that didn’t work either.
“When I remove myself
From the picture
When I reduce myself
I see you the same
And I couldn't find my way
Out of this feeling”
Loma, Half Silences
Driving as Cathartic Ritual
Bec and I covered a lot of ground to find each other in a Best Western Hotel in Albuquerque on Friday the 9th May. Bec had travelled over land for two days by sleeper train, and I’d flown in from NY to Albuquerque. We met late in the evening in a dingy but comfortable twin room at a hotel just outside the airport.
Waffle House, and getting to Avis Car Rentals. May 2025
We slept well (ish) and in the morning, after a dip in the pool and a run around the block, we went to collect our car for the week ahead. The morning’s drive out of the Avis car rental depot, and onto a 5-line highway was hilarious.
Getting our shit together
We both comprised a bodily state of anxiety, a wild bag of nerves, and at once a desire to get going and on the mission. We were holding it together and test driving our two minds becoming one, with four eyes scanning the highway horizon on high intensity risk alert.
That day marked the start of a seven-day road trip where we covered an average of 250 miles a day, which roughly the equivalent of the drive between Bristol – Coniston.
Once we had settled into the car, and our new life on the road, we pretty much split the driving, with some conditions much more demanding than others; like the road that google maps said was like a B road, but was actually a 100 Red caked mud covered track, that ran on for about 40 mins of lets really not get stuck driving.
On the road, speed becomes the normal velocity. Movement is constant. It becomes a daily practice. Rolling. Speeding. Fast. Fast. Fast. Rolling. And Driving. And hyper focussing as hundreds of miles of landscape pass by the sitting body. Watching the road, pas, pass, pass. A fly by static hack; a still body but fast eyes.
And in the driving ritual, chasing ceaseless speed, one may well at times manage to, strangely, still the mind. Music is vital as is time spent, when not driving, staring out the window in a total stupor.
Driving to our plot for the night. 40 mins drive from the Grand Canyon.
The long, wide-open road, flanked by the arid, volcanic, shrubby, abstract, bulbous rock and landforms that make up the high desert became a strange balm. And the changing landscape was often the topic of conversation. On day two, I think I drove on a single road as we headed from New Mexico, into Arizona, heading towards the Grand Canyon, for about 200 miles.
Stone Mesh Dress 1 mile down in the Canyon
The relentless movement, coupled by sleeping somewhere new each night, and sorting basic needs like eating, exercising and getting to the places we wanted to experience, created a vacuum of stimulation and newness that successfully sucked me into, more often than not a presence of mind that until this trip, I had been lacking.
In covering four states in seven days, we routinely went off piste; seeking out places of geographic interest; like volcanic lava tubes, set deep in the Mojave desert. In seeking out subaltern, deep and dark cut throughs beneath the earth’s surface, we got really lost, in the mid morning heat of the Mojave; both of us feeling fear, as we realised there was no signal, the track was tiny, and we were at least 10 miles from a slightly bigger track; a route that would not constitute a road. We made it back, but the fear was real.
Lost and found in the Mojave
Because I Always Feel Like Running
“Because I always feel like running
Not away, because there is no such place
Because if there was, I would have found it by now
Because it's easier to run,
Easier than staying and finding out you're the only one who didn't run
Because running will be the way your life and mine will be described,
As in "the long run"
Or as in having "given someone a run for his money"
Or as in "running out of time"
Because running makes me look like everyone else, though I hope there will never be cause for that
Because I will be running in the other direction, not running for cover
Because if I knew where cover was, I would stay there and never have to run for it
Not running for my life, because I have to be running for something of more value to be running and not in fear
Because the thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from,
Not without showing the fear as I see it now
Because closer, clearer, no sir, nearer
Because of you and because of that nice
That you quietly, quickly be causing
And because you're going to see me run soon and because you're going to know why I'm running then
You'll know then
Because I'm not going to tell you now”
Gil Scott-Heron, Now and Then...Forgetting
Symbolic Burials in The Mojave
I wrote this thing beastly feeling-being state thing. It’s going to be published later this year, so I’m gunna wait til it’s published to share. Ongoing fucking process of separation / reflection / psychic boundary control.
HDTS
Driving from the day of The Mojave fear – the day we actually got lost in, and then returned from the guts of the desert. We travelled through the extreme arid, sand dust coloured desert, where there was literally nothing around for hours at a time.
On this long day of being lost, totally off-line in arid and off-road environments, and then recovering ourselves, we realised we were going to pass through Joshua Tree, and come close to Andrea Zittel’s project, High Desert Test Site.
High Desert Test Site
I’ve been coming across this project for years; through reading Johanna Hedva’s work Minerva and the Miscarriage of the Brain; through coming across the writing of Eden Solas, and through figuring out ways to make it up there on a work-exchange residency at some point.
We phoned ahead, and said we were going to arrive outside of visiting hours, and could we swing by closer to 5pm. The woman who picked up the phone, Aida was there to meet us, but other than that the place was pretty quiet, with just a few residents hanging out in the sun reading on the deck.
We were given a tour and a map, and left to wonder through the studios, and then we wended our way up to the reading room. This room was set back off the main track, a stand-alone cabin, dedicated entirely to books and to the never not beguiling practice of reading. Cool in the summer, and with a stove for cold winters, with a little sink outside, it was one of the most modernist, calm, beautifully situated reading rooms I’ve ever sat in. Reading rooms are my love language. Reading together, another one. Sharing books, swapping notes, reading each other blogs, writing for each other, friends and impossible strangers. Reading Rooms as shared culture. Reading Rooms as love language.
High Desert Test Site - The best reading room
Bec went outside to take a call, and I sat in there, reading for a while, followed quite quickly by a reverie; involuntarily dreaming of ways I could come back and have a longer stay; which is still something I want to try to sort out for spring next year. Let’s see if I will get my time in the desert, amongst the heat and the Joshua Trees.
“I was born in the desert. I’ve been down for years.
Jesus, come closer, I think my time is near.
I’ve travelled over dry earth and floods,
hell and high water, to bring you my love.
I’ve climbed over mountains, travelled the seas,
and cast out of heaven, cast down on my knees.
I have lain with the devil and cursed God above,
and forsaken heaven to bring you my love.”
PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love
Full moon burials of spines and beating hearts in the high desert
References
Blossom, V (2024) How to Fuck Like a Girl. LA: DOPAMINE / Semiotext(e)
Fedorova, A. (2025) Second Skin. London: Granta.
Hedva, J(2020) Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. San Francisco: Sming Sming Books and Wolfman Books.
Stryker, s. (2024) When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Solas, E (2017) Scout Series 3: Tender Tinder Tarot Teacher. Joshua Tree: High Desert Test Sites.
Wang, J (2023) Alien Daughters Walk Into The Sun. LA: Semiotext(e)