Subtle Body
︎︎︎ Matthew Gasda
︎ Nov 13, 2026
The eye moves between the divisions
in the world, the point.
You know, something like opening a letter,
receiving.
Half fractals of divination.
Tossed off.
This is only the greater part.
The small movement of a minor symphony,
something that in memory
instantiates a gift.
The flood of destruction that says to personality,
“You must name yourself or perish.
You must perish in order not to name yourself,
and therefore to fix yourself.”
To the well-designed altar of prefiguration.
Every day is a terrible threatening
without resurrection.
Without the morning of emotion.
With a sense of winding yourself up
so that you can hurl yourself
towards uninhabited space
above or even below the soul.
You might say there is order, but there is not.
The apartment gets bad light,
so you turn all the incandescents on.
There is no hesitation. You ratchet awake.
You move towards the coffee machine.
You wait for someone to open the door,
to slip a letter through the door even,
but no one does, so you sit in the chair.
Stripped of touch like a
prisoner.
In isolation.
Language has no way of telling you what it is.
It can only describe its claim on us.
In recursive.
Battered scraps of metaphor.
·
How nice it would be to live
in the woods,
in the winter under the moon
with a wife and child.
To hunt and fish to be self-sustaining,
to be out at the edge,
far beyond the habitations of the rest of society,
working in all things flesh and hearth,
aging without ever looking in the mirror.
How sweet that would be.
Breathing, the heartbeat, thirst, hunger,
the need for sleep,
sexuality, fertility,
thought,
water from a spring.
Say the ego’s practical relationship to its own body
determines its relationship to other bodies,
nature, space, and vice versa.
Yes, the relationship to space is reflected
in the relationship to the other,
the other’s body, the other’s consciousness.
As you were,
the dimming world of shadows.
Heterotopical places,
laying on the floor.
Experiencing the panic attack was military violence.
As if missiles were liberating the city,
vehicles rolling down the street.
As if knowledge was still knowledge
and history was still history,
each decrypting each other.
As if time was still punctuated by festivals
celebrated in physical space
rather than the collapsed space of
paranoid imagination.
Solipsism drives you through spirals
of spatial abstraction
till you take yourself over,
till you cannibalize yourself,
till language becomes the code of this inner space,
and all you can speak to is this.
Distance from others.
·
No one you love is forced to love you in return.
But you were forced to love them somehow,
and even then they don’t believe it.
in the world, the point.
You know, something like opening a letter,
receiving.
Half fractals of divination.
Tossed off.
This is only the greater part.
The small movement of a minor symphony,
something that in memory
instantiates a gift.
The flood of destruction that says to personality,
“You must name yourself or perish.
You must perish in order not to name yourself,
and therefore to fix yourself.”
To the well-designed altar of prefiguration.
Every day is a terrible threatening
without resurrection.
Without the morning of emotion.
With a sense of winding yourself up
so that you can hurl yourself
towards uninhabited space
above or even below the soul.
You might say there is order, but there is not.
The apartment gets bad light,
so you turn all the incandescents on.
There is no hesitation. You ratchet awake.
You move towards the coffee machine.
You wait for someone to open the door,
to slip a letter through the door even,
but no one does, so you sit in the chair.
Stripped of touch like a
prisoner.
In isolation.
Language has no way of telling you what it is.
It can only describe its claim on us.
In recursive.
Battered scraps of metaphor.
·
How nice it would be to live
in the woods,
in the winter under the moon
with a wife and child.
To hunt and fish to be self-sustaining,
to be out at the edge,
far beyond the habitations of the rest of society,
working in all things flesh and hearth,
aging without ever looking in the mirror.
How sweet that would be.
Breathing, the heartbeat, thirst, hunger,
the need for sleep,
sexuality, fertility,
thought,
water from a spring.
Say the ego’s practical relationship to its own body
determines its relationship to other bodies,
nature, space, and vice versa.
Yes, the relationship to space is reflected
in the relationship to the other,
the other’s body, the other’s consciousness.
As you were,
the dimming world of shadows.
Heterotopical places,
laying on the floor.
Experiencing the panic attack was military violence.
As if missiles were liberating the city,
vehicles rolling down the street.
As if knowledge was still knowledge
and history was still history,
each decrypting each other.
As if time was still punctuated by festivals
celebrated in physical space
rather than the collapsed space of
paranoid imagination.
Solipsism drives you through spirals
of spatial abstraction
till you take yourself over,
till you cannibalize yourself,
till language becomes the code of this inner space,
and all you can speak to is this.
Distance from others.
·
No one you love is forced to love you in return.
But you were forced to love them somehow,
and even then they don’t believe it.