A Perfect Vacuum: Maybe to get started, it’d be great to know whether you have ever been in a sensory deprivation tank.

Mary Walling Blackburn:  Once. The tank rental was a birthday present.  It wasn't completely sealed; vibrations from trucks moved through the space at times. Also, I didn’t catch the instructions. I guess you are supposed to slick yourself with Vaseline before you go in. I suddenly became aware of certain wounds that weren't visible to the eye. I kept bumping against the walls. 

APV: There's something that seems appropriate about slicking yourself down with the petroleum jelly and the only sensations you can actually feel are semis during what is ostensibly an encounter with the self outside the world.  

MWB: It’s an activity that categorically functions within a bucketlist system that monetizes experience; these kinds of businesses work to simultaneously make an activity custom fit and uniform. 

I once booked a room at a nudist colony because it was the cheapest hotel room in the area I was working in. The term colony can be archaic, but the nudists were colonizers–mostly white settlers occupying unceded land. The naturist camp was right on the border of two countries. Long term residents would sometimes hear informal border crossers moving through. The line of flight of these informal border crossers overlooked these naked citizens gathered around firepits or on their way to a mossy pool with their grandchildren. 

I never could land on the experience as experienced by a cohesive and singular “I”-- that I  being me. What’s hovering above all of us/some/them? Whose downwind? Or who’s downwind? What [state apparatus] or who [human] and whom [more than human] makes record of this? Presently, it feels like both the victims and the state are writing it all down. The violence of transcription/ making official record reminds me of the research on formerly agrarian communities in Southeast Asia who abandoned written language and farming on the margins of the royal epicenters for the edge, for foraging and oral transmission. This grossly out of balance world produces the question “Who Will Write the Next Great Naturist Novel?” YAWP. 

APV: How do you see this compressed transcriptive web as a part of your writing - as a kind of a gel? An aspic?

MWB: Sometimes a hero-head pops out of my ass shouting, “:“I AM part of something gross.” Something white and shitty.” So, yeah a political and ontological undercarriage to a writing that keeps compressing relationality.  Absolutely. Part of what complicates is that my recall is visual, so I have to put images back into language before I speak or write. When I remember things I don't remember verbatim, so I have trouble remembering people's names. I can more easily conjure, say, serving someone a sesame bagel twenty-five years ago, than the bagel-eater’s name. When I think about what you're asking-- there's a sort of crisis - not in being, but a crisis in the image. My brain is struggling to locate images amongst the non-images that arise in this question. Writing ends up being an act among the images. 

….

I have a young child, studying from home. We were learning about North America. The last two weeks we were studying  Kalaallit Nunaat, also referred to as Greenland. It was my kid's decision to leave our studies of Nunavut and move over to Kalaallit Nunaat. So I decided to read Niviaq Korneliussen’s Last Night in Nuuk. But together, my child and myself were reading about their independence movement, ruby mines, Danish colonialism, and a meteorite stolen by a US expedition and now housed in the American Museum of Natural History, and also a book where a monster is devouring all these beings. Finally, one person goes in with a knife.  After they're devoured, they cut from in to out to exit and that's how they end up surviving and liberating everyone else from the belly. 

APV: So for you, does writing function as that knife or stone to allow for a trajectory across the event? 

MWB: Presently, for me, writing is the illusion of being both inside and outside of an event. [It might feel to some readers that the monstrous skeins of events are rotting in my text…Who is ok reading  something that stinks like that? Readers who are casual to a sort of a sort of writing - like Hilda Hilst, Dennis Cooper, Herve Guibert, Bhanu Kapil…readers who re-re-read Charlotte Beradt’s Third Reich of Dreams and Griselidis Real’s reflections on being an anarchist whore.  So on reflection, yes, writing is a cutting tool to move across a node that seems to also be a hole. An asshole? I, Writer.. am an asshole teetering on the rim.

But to speak of tools...There's a way that since I've had COVID, language retrieval is hobbled.  There's a sense that I have lost a tool in the fog. What happens when language is reduced? But it was already radically pruned. For me, no lingua neanderthal or Dguernesais, no Norn. I can remember having a dream and as a child where there was, I don't know, 12 different people hanging from ropes from a tree, dead in Europe, and they were all swinging there, the hills behind them. It was clear to me that it wasn't this continent [North America]. Twelve or so... cloaked bodies swinging from a tree in medieval Europe. But the event and language have been threshed apart. This is all related to the question of the tool -  where a person is left with a severed scene and partial or no inherited language (from the event itself) to disinter it.  However, reconstituted Norn and Dguernesais wouldn’t help with this dream from my inherited psychic crypt. Those specific languages were generated in and through rocky lands surrounded by sea. No hanging trees. The only wood were logs that washed ashore, logs delivered by currents, all the way from North America.

APV: Do you think that there is a way in which scenes of violence in their fragmented and maybe dreamed  or hallucinated form are predisposed to being conjured outside of memory or as an outside to it?  

MWB: I come from a family where people remember their dreams and relay them. There's a notion that the dreams are sometimes prophetic, and so the content of our dreams can stretch backwards and forwards. This is something I grew up with, but my child doesn't dream like this, so I see the cleaver here, right? I see the end of a line of dreaming, but certainly not the end of the line in regards to US  violence. And now there’s one less tool, for my child, to poke it [the violence] from a distance and move it away, inside the brain. 

APV: Can that movement be performed on the page ? 

MWB: There’s a moment when our narcissism diminishes and we sometimes then say, well, is the violence on the page enough to dislodge the violence of the state? 

APV: And is there that capacity for dislodging, however limited? 

MWB: There’s the magic of something…I am not sure what I meant by that. Maybe I meant the magic of raw hope...raw hope that one can unhinge capitalism’s art world courtiers and courtesans through words. You can’t flip them from garden variety Bernie supporters to effectual revolutionaries but maybe you can just depress them deeply enough to make them not so useful to the regime anymore! 

I was taken down by a book when I was fifteen; Zola’s Nana incapacitated me- when I wasn’t serving pork cutlets and parker house rolls to wealthy summer residents or babysitting at the lake club, I was prone. As I read on our couch, I could smell the summer dumpster (an actual restaurant dumpster just below our livingroom window; the stink deepens with heat).  In the book, Nana is the golden fly who feasts on the top of the shitpile, in her case, French elite society. It appears that my proposal (book as weapon) is a bit ineffectual in that I was able to wage labor through book-induced malaise.  It would be five  years before I read Germinal.

So...Yes. My writing is failing, when it's not mutilating the elite 

Certainly, on one side of my family, I would say we're useless to Marx, we're that “bad.” The ‘unthinking strata’ that cannot be organized.

APV: Well Gramsci loves you.

MWB: My bumper sticker: GRAMSCI LOVES ME…but I don't drive. 

Still, I just don’t know how you up the ante. While I'm writing now, I am asking how do I self-exorcise? And what might be... what will be the last thing I write? I wonder those things because people do stop writing. It's not a fiction – people cease. My grandfather’s heart exploded when he was walking down the street in Houston when he was fifty. I’m forty-nine, so I have some feelings. My grandfather, as ghost, loiters. Will I go soon, too? A family doctor told me that he sees family resemblances in the genitals of his patients- child like parent- and so, does my heart, too, resemble his? 

On the radio, there was a virologist who was saying that a million years ago, our ancestors, whatever we descend from, still had eggs. But, there was a virus and the virus created what we think of today as the placenta. The placenta is of virus born. Otherwise, I would have popped out a gigantic Easter egg when my child was born. And so all say: “Well, thank you, virus. I don't want to think of my own egg, hard” (even though we would be used to it and cool with it. The preppers might hard boil it.) Basically, everyone is trying to do their best to suddenly become comfortable with a spectrum of viruses. Some scientists want to say that there is a virus kingdom--they might be creatures. Some don't. Kingdom or not, viruses insist on our coping with invisible, yet animate, things. They are not the only entities in this category: roiling fascist ideologies, dreams and spirochetes, the Quora forums dedicated to the demonic possesion of cell phones. 

APV: And why not pop out of an Easter egg?

MWB: Like a platypus, a Christian one.

On viruses and language: my paternal grandfather was a soldier in World War II...For the twenty five some odd years I knew him, he would pick me up from my father’s out in the desert and drive me west to my grandmother’s house in Anaheim. The cars were extraordinarily long and comfortable and cold. They had AC. The length of the drive he didn’t speak but smoked.  He didn’t live with my grandmother. At this point, they were friends.  He would just come over and sit there. The house was clean and modest. She had hot coffee, cigarettes, Sees ribbon candy, bottles of Mexican Coca-cola for hang overs, blue plastic jugs of cold water. She lived there with her former lover, at the end of a cul-de-sac. We kids called him Uncle Carl but he wasn’t our uncle. He was the father of her youngest child whom we called Uncle Barry. Uncle Carl and Uncle Barry poured cement for a living. It is not so unlikely they paved over miles of orange groves, the new parts of Disneyland, all the way to the lip of the ocean.  They had a silky mutt named Baby who would sometimes accompany them on the job; Uncle Barry would slide his underwear over her legs and the tail through the slit in the crotch. He would laugh while Baby wagged and wagged her phallus-tail. [Like one dip of a monarch butterflies wing- wag, wag-, was there now a tempest brewing on the other side of the earth?]

After the drive, my grandfather  mostly sat there with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee, gazing off. He had a job as a used car salesman; he made the sales by way of the hard stare?  He suffered from what they used to call shell shock; after some bombardment, there was a part of him that was no longer linguistic. Talk about tools: broken tongue and new wedge. His speech was stymied by what he had seen and what he had done. Still, once in awhile, his face released a very slow lop-sided grin.

He got very sick at one point. He and my grandmother, though they hadn't they lived together in many years, had always remained friends, so she, instead of one of his girlfriends,  took him to the hospital, and the doctors couldn't figure it out. Finally, a doctor somehow had the notion to take a skin sample from my grandfather’s legs. There was some sort of infection in his legs, a sort of wound or welt, some sort of problem with the leg that hadn’t been there previously. He looks at it under a microscope and asks my grandmother if my grandfather had ever been in certain tropical zones of the Pacific. She says yes. He asks where and when. And there you go.. what was living in his legs all these years had come from that slaughtering time. The linguistic part of him was deadened there, but this virus was very alive decades later, incubated. And then suddenly, more expressive than my grandfather. The doctor told my grandmother:“It’s actually quite beautiful under the microscope.” She laughed in response (with my grandfather? at the beauty? To the irony of  slow-release war tribunals?) The gorgeous virus was lugging my grandfather around- you know, more alive than he...still defending its site of origin, a thousand miles away from my grandfather’s initial trespass. Let’s say a virus is a blooming writ...delivered in a human blank.

APV: To shift, then, I wonder if we can talk about what you’re working on, how you’re situating your work as it pertains to what we’ve speaking about.  

MWB: I have slightly begun a speculative history of the Polaroid. It's not the best topic, but it's the topic that could stand cultural exorcism and requires self-exorcism. 

Earlier I relayed that I think in images rather than words. Sometimes that is nice- a honeycomb of shapes, the corner of a mouth, a skein of clouds. But I am also plagued by having absorbed violent images, in polaroid form, and in the persistence of these images...the distress feels epic.

There is also this sordid history of the Polaroid company, which is no surprise in terms of the way that technologies are often nurtured by military demands. Beyond its direct connection to the mid-century US military, also consider its use in problematic anthropological expeditions sponsored by Harvard. Consider the  Polaroid as something that is useful for serial killers who are also trophy hunters.  And so on. The soldier, the cop, and serial killer- all crave their own sorts of trophies. Have they been dependent on Polaroid in various ways for that? Yes.

APV: How do you read the inscription of trauma into the polaroid? Or how are you framing the instant here? 

MWB: When we're looking at an instant image of a human, we understand the time scale- an object that is a subject posed/”captured”; wet chemicals shook dry; a subject facing their own face through the prism of sorted gazes, mechanical and human- all  too quickly. There’s a kind of hiccup when the Polaroid migrates into digital space. When we actually see the image of a Polaroid- within a pagescroll- in terms of the white frame, it is exceedingly corny. Not immediately traumatic but immediately sentimental- before one can even abscertain what is framed. What do we make of a corny, stupid nostalgia when its application accompanies something extremely violent ? A deeper, faster putrefecation? I don’t know.

We take the Polaroid that's been used in really violent ways along with the ones that have not but they all have the same format and mechanical process and the same production heritage. They can work in opposite ways, in countercurrent, but in our brain they share a category. There is a request- please hold them apart. So, I need some sort of language that acts as a separator.

Nonetheless, I experience a gentler feeling from some Polaroids... made in hermetic register. I am thinking about 9,200 self-portrait polaroids by April Dawn Alison or the several thousand private polaroids of Horst Ademeit.  Each document an interior leak, looping.

Also, consider a set of polaroids  made by Kimowan Metchewais.  Some of the polaroids  are really playful, well composed images of his body- his long self in a banana yellow jumpsuit, long hair brushing the floor.  And then there's some where he's labeled  nude and then in parentheses, he has written, “yikes!!!”. 

Yikes is right. Sometimes it is both shocking and funny... to be naked. To gape at our own mushrooming anatomy, successive pits of hair from anus to nostril. Peel back your clothing to unveil a  whacky flap and an alarming tube; your doffed hat reveals...an ear. It’s weird, too. Yoiks. 

He retools the polaroid and its heteronormative habit of shelling the self from a body and its context , a practice that otherwise leaves the viewer holding its somatic husk. “Yikes!” In this context, marginalia is the gizmo that splices the object to the subject. I am thankful for the splice.

APV: I’m reminded of the famous Voyager Gold Record.

MWB: And the Gold Record is a piece of shit [both laugh].  

It only points back to those that made it and to their failure to imagine anything else but what they are--obstinately naive invaders searching for resources, for markets, and dumps. 

Gold Record Producers imagine an infinite audience in our jam-packed universe.  Hubris. It is the Great American Novel...Record. Crafted\spun/scratched at MacDowell Colony/ NASA. Same problem. 

But let’s entertain their premise for a moment. What deity, which pulsating black hole, might detect it with “a banana-shaped ear?” [ Pauline Oliveros]. How long and dense is that ear? Will that entity listen in like a sonogram’s wand? Will they stick their ear-wand into earth and simultaneously hear multitudes of heartbeats (arboreal, human, marine, geological)? Which hearts cling to the wand with its withdrawal?