DANNY HAYWARD READS Tegan’s ‘Lo, Commitment’

Hey babe, hey love,

‘I’ve been thinking’ is such a bleak artificial way of phrasing it, but I’ve been listening to your mixes and thinking about the noises you like, about these rhythms of quote unquote ‘club music’ seized upon like fabric from a coma then stretched wide awake. I’ve been thinking about the connection between these rhythms and the rhythms in your poems, about the way you talk about consciousness as this thing that’s been pulled till a rip propagates through it and ‘the world [seeps] in through the gap’: ‘I didn’t take my meds last night so I had a series of dreams rather than nothing and they were dreams not the nightmares I wake myself up from so they don’t become’. In an essay that sort of gets alluded to in your pamphlet, Wilfred Bion describes a patient of his for whom ‘the experience of being understood has been split up, converted into particles of sexual abuse and ejected’, and I don’t know what you think but to me this sounds exactly like a description of musical post-production, a description of a filter applied to a signal: something more like delay or compression than anything that could be approaching using the word ‘metaphor’, or any of the other related and outdated Greek terms; I guess because of the way ‘the experience of being understood’ has been broken down, has been dissolved into a material substrate, into particle pollution, into atoms of sexual abuse in the air. Actually, it’s really more like the opposite of metaphorical thinking, because the resemblance of the two terms to one another is preserved at the material level but negated at the level of form, but in any case when first I encountered this text after looking up some of the allusions in Lo, Commitment I started (here’s that verb again) to think about this trope of processing, granularisation, disintegration for the first time in a long time: about rhythm as consciousness, not of but as that which has been split up, granulated and downtuned; about the rhythms of your mixes as whatever is bit split up and splayed into us and this is what we are. All of these abrasive, maxillary textures. And I guess this is one model of reading, one way of learning to speak about the things going on in our heads using the materials of ‘this other kind of off-hand world’, the world where you go outside, go to clubs maybe, have political opinions, get public transport, behave like people, basically, in a reality where you can talk about how bad things are and they are bad but at least it is stably and reliably there and you have a body which experiences and encounters it, that doesn’t immediately break down, and at the end of Lo, Commitment all of this re-appears beautifully and painfully in a dream: this healthy world of people who, you know, we almost used to be, who don’t find themselves in the situation you’re in, in this pamphlet, the situation where two bodies lie in a bed, one sleeping, the other listening, one sleeping and the other listening to the noises [granular, disintegrative] of their breathing, and feeling afraid, about everything, about what happens next, about what it means to never write and spend my life speaking and losing my head on the internet:

‘The text is really personal, it's about all the shit around me and coming out of me and the morbid institutions posturing care while misunderstanding every word you say. It took me so much anger to get it out, unsurprised only a little that I never write’  

I might be wrong, but I think it’s the head that is touched most often in your poems. The head that is the hardest part of the body, that is the most resistant to localized plastic deformations, to indentations (over an area) or scratches (linear) induced mechanically by pressing or abrasion. The head that’s the part least likely to collapse when the fingers of someone who you love / who loves you brush against it, or rest upon its temples. I think in your recent poems I see you working towards this kind of defining, primal situation, where two people lie together in states of attempted rest, both of them unwell, both of them frightened of the things going on inside of them, frightened of themselves and in specific ways of touching, of touching one another, of being touched. And in all of your poems in this pamphlet I feel the pulses that these fears produce and the specific, familiar kinds of language they give rise to, the slogans and twitches and cries that are fought against because this is not the situation that we’re in now, and we who are not good at this need to find a new language that we weren’t prepared for, that doesn’t come easily to us, the language that makes sense in this new situation, in which the other person is so near to us and the rage and the despair that comes from our own body can only be harmful for them; we need to constantly remind ourselves of where (who) we are now, even when we are not there, even when we are inside another space, a space of confinement or ‘commitment’ whose language if it is language is the language of diagrams, of geometry, of the brutality of mathematics stripped down to its bare functions, like toilets without seats in a room where you are permitted to defecate but not kill yourself. And this is what ‘care’ is now, in the new language: this endless attempt to remember our situation together as another kind of phantom space that fills and inhabits the space that is most visible in this life, the institutional space of confinement and separation whose language, if it is language, is language as bare extension and proliferating visual snow. The language of a bed in which one person lies with another and watches them sleep, or touches them on the head, without tears again for the first time, has to be pulled out from the coma of that noise and stretched wide awake until it begins to resemble the texture of our love for one another; and this is not a metaphor, since you go to the one (institutional) place in order to stay with the other:

I’m not here for your ad slice or for you

to get back to work but because

I want to stay

alive for those I love

because by leaving you hope to learn how to stay, which is something you’ve never done before, and which you have no idea how to do, though language that teaches you to do it makes you want to run away, and of course that’s necessary too, because ‘healing’ is a palindrome not a syllogism and leads forever backwards away from the point we need to get to. And I’ve said barely anything here, but when you write ‘I look at you / asleep no peace / we are moved we / a flower’, Tegan, when you transform the slogan like this into another palindrome, and no justice no peace plays plays backwards like a lullaby to a person who suffers unjustly and is sleeping peacefully for once, I really have nothing to say to you except what someone once said to me, which is that I am with you, or intensely and inarticulately want to be, which for the time being has to be the same thing, regardless.

Danny