Music by Panoptique Electrical.
Composed and performed by Jason Sweeney.

Ask me about the blood. Ask me how it got there. Ask me how long it took to accumulate so much of it all over the carpet, all over the house, the walls, the ceiling. Ask me where he is, why he’s not returned anyone’s call. Ask me to confess. Ask me to speak, very clearly, very slowly, with as much detail as possible, as to my whereabouts on the night before last. Ask me again. Ask me different questions in various ways. Ask me to shut up. Ask me to shut the fuck up and be silent. Ask me about the kind of relationship he and I had. Ask me about our political inclinations and our tendency to read the independent media. Ask me if he really did say “I would die for this cause” or to be more precise “I would die for you”. Ask me if he really said that or if, in fact, I have a habit of making things up. Ask me for my name, in full, and to inform you of my previous three residential addresses. Ask me for phone numbers, bank account details, contacts for doctors, copies of bills, correspondance with any government organisation. Ask me to show you the originals. Ask me why, on one occasion, I had to disguise my identity and sexual preference in order to gain employment. Ask me why they didn’t give me the job. And then, ask me again about the blood. Ask me who it belongs to. Ask me why I didn’t call the police earlier. Ask me about this video and dvd collection sitting on my shelves and why so much of it is so transgressive. Ask me about that painting on the wall, the one with the asexual looking guy with that sinister look on his face. Ask me what that’s all about. Ask me how long he and I had been seeing each other and if we were actually living together in the same house or was it more of a casual situation, for example, and did I have any other lovers. Ask me how much money I earn. Ask me about my aversion to small children and babies. Ask me why I have no time for families especially those with new-borns. Ask me what it is, exactly, I have against life, against reproduction, against nature, as you might call it. Ask me why I am so angry or at least appear to be, to you, the one who is asking me so many fucking questions. Ask me why I just don’t give up, give it all up and be done with it. Ask me: have I thought about suicide and then immediately after this ask me why I have thought about it so many times and then continue to interrogate me on why I have attempted it and the methods I chose, seemingly with a successive amount of failure. Ask me again about the blood. Ask me the obvious question. Ask me to identify the body and would I mind stepping into the small room for a moment while you make your enquires. Ask me if I am making it all up, pretending to have invented some story about a man who loved so much that he had to kill the very thing he wanted to possess. Ask me how that could happen. Ask me if that is what could happen. Ask me if something like love could drive you to the point of murder.

(Jason)

I AM LOST AND FOUND AND FALLING DOWN IN ORDER TO STAND UP AGAIN

I wonder who I am becoming? I feel like a work-in-progress, like the rubble pit an architect scans when trying to construct a new building in place of one that has been demolished. Can I use the bones of the one to flesh out the other? Aiming for continuity, a semblance of narrative to frame what was against what is and what will be. The body is a site where fear and desire intersect. At that point of intersection much can go wrong it seems. The biological fabric of Self tears, wears, frays and Self fragments, leaks out into the wilderness of the Undiscovered Self. How did I arrive at this intersection? What are the choices, good and “questionable” that brought me to this point? I look behind me and see the ghost of my Former Self, hugging a bottle, rocking in a chair, alone in a dark room in which the light struggles to make an impact. The walls of the room weep. She is bound up in psychic knots of frustration, anxiety and longing. But we all chase shadows in our dreams. I’ve stopped having nightmares. A weight has lifted. I nearly disappeared from view, literally. The weight of the past fell from my bones. Major illness, and major injury are sites of fear and desire manifest in the body. There is no escaping the body at such times. The body screams for attention but how to listen to the message? How to make sense? How to pick up the pieces of rubble and start rebuilding? Am I even the architect of my Self?

Who is the Self left in the wake of trauma? And what of that Self lost along the way? Where did she go, anyhow?

When the body is radically changed by trauma, when the physiological Self is affected by trauma, when the psychological Self is affected by trauma, the relationship to space/s change too. By trauma I am speaking of a violent disruption, or rupture. Navigating space is brought into a new awareness. I think of myself as a person who walks. I used to take long walks, through cities and landscapes. Now each step I am able to take becomes a victory, a triumph over adversity, and each step I can’t take forces me to grieve for what has been lost, that part of Self I thought was “real”. When someone close to us dies suddenly we lose an Other through whom we defined some part of our Self. The most traumatic example perhaps is the loss of a child. The (Mother/Father) Self might never recovery, will probably never return to that Self they knew before such significant traumatic loss. So what is the Self? Grief is visceral. We use phrases like, “it was an unbearable pain”, “every part of me ached with the sensation of loss”, and “my heart felt broken beyond repair”. How bound to the body is Self? Is Self constructed physiologically, or psychologically? If you have ever been “clinically depressed” for example, you might have asked: Am I this? Or am I a hostage to this?

The loss of Self, the search for True Self, the constant construction of social Selves for all occasions. Do our fears and desires tell us something about who we really are? How do fear and desire shape us? Inform our sense of Self?

Am I woman who can, or am I a woman who can’t? Am I a woman who will, or am I a woman who won’t? And how will the answers to such questions reveal (the real) Me?

(Fiona)