a correspondence between txe roimeser and lu ciccia

21 dec. 2023, 10:53 am in cdmx

Dear txe,

[…]

Though perhaps an informal start, I would like to share here a question that I had when I read (you) through your work: how do you experience your body when you write, when you come up with ideas? What do your cells breathe through your sensory-motor movements?

I pose this personal/political question as a catalyst, one I also ask myself, so that I can send you something more precise and focused on your work next Thursday. Again, my apologies for the delay.

Many hugs and love in these violent times.

Awaiting your thoughts,

lu

27 dec. 2023, 2:45 pm in bcn

good morning

i hope that, despite… i hope you’re comfortable and cosy. i understand the difficulty and the anguish and, with or without a catalyst, take whatever time you need. i’m also unsure of how to get in touch with the family in rosario these days, because of the physical distance and knowing that my dad and i have been able to halfway forget about it these days from here.

i tried thinking about your question from a practical perspective, and the most practical things i do are karate and taking care of plants, and i very much want to take that question seriously and think it through, so, to be honest, i couldn’t yet put it into practice but will respond gradually —though i often feel afraid when writing, or write from fear, but that’s still not quite the answer—.

big hug,

and if it’s not thursday that’s ok, we can play the capricorn lab a bit by ear

28 dec. 2023, 4:30 pm in cdmx

txe,

I forgot that you had fam in Rosario!! Hope they’re all well ;) I think I channelled the book…. flu :) I say this, because the question I asked you about the mind-body relationship comes to mind… and I think about karate and plants, and if that body that comes back from those practices interacts differently with what it creates: I love that the response is gradual, I can’t wait to see it come in tiny flights of (in)certainties.

I loved the capri lab… we can play it by ear, but also, if you need to, we can give it a bit of structure, do you think we can take it up again after the holidays, the week of the 8th of January?

If we run short of the agreed spaces, bearing in mind that we have until March, we could double the frequency from that point on. That is, one email from you and one from me a week.

Big hugs for you,

lu

11 jan. 2024 5:47 pm in bcn

hey there, i hope this email finds you well, i wrote a bit out of the blue—i’ve never used that expression before—it’s more or less set and all open to further questioning. and i’ll keep pausing to see what happens when i write. thanks for the challenge :)

sending you a huge hug!

back from holiday. wednesday, almost 3 pm. it’s cloudy and I’m glad, it’s one of those days when I can walk around saying “I watered the garden today” without having to step outside. yesterday i noticed that the zucchini seeds we brought with my dad from a shop at the bus terminal in rosario are already flowering—i planted them randomly one day—and they were an excuse to plant corn, but it’s never the right season, or i don’t have the patience to wait for the corn, beans and pumpkin, and instead we’ve got zucchini planted in summer.

today i spent some time thinking about what happens when i write, obviously together with the plants and karate. i think while writing, it’s the first thing i think i can say, i can’t stop to think, instead I follow the sentence with another and follow it with more sentences, which then make little sense one after another. that i write out loud and speak softly. i write less since i took up karate again. in fact, i have a failure diary, where I record a failure every day, and lately i forget and then i’ve got to go over two weeks’ worth of things in a single day so that i can catch up. and with karate, i go back to that beginning of the sentence, the other day i could have written that i hurt my big toe trying to do an exercise in the workshop that i can’t do in the dojo, but i haven’t written it down yet. i think practicing calms me down, or focuses me on things that I want to be important, and that’s not normally what I write about, that when I write a lot it’s because I’m not well, or that I need a space for dialogue. six days ago i was presenting a project for a call for proposals, the project involved going to a private clinic and getting a mastectomy, a part of the project, i wrote it down and for me the surgery wasn’t at all relevant, it was more of an excuse to talk about many other things. that’s what i mean about karate calming me down or grounding me, karate was important in the same project, the 6 principles—with emphasis on the third one, which is to have patience—and a “palo santo” bonsai tree, which i don’t know if i told you about, my dad brought me some seeds years ago and i’m seeing if they sprout so that I can take their seasonality into account, which i don’t know if that would mean talking about now or about when my old man picked them up and now, it’s been a few weeks since they’ve been in the ground and nothing’s coming up.

a while ago i was thinking that, when i write, i also try to, i don’t know where it comes from, but there—like an undefined place—water passes through, or you feel the humidity of when i lived in asturias with kaos, the rabbit, and in the collective. i’m going to put lemon in a ginger tea and settle down for a while on the tatami, to attend to those breaths when i (don’t) write.

i printed out the question and there it is:

photo_2024-01-11_17-44-56.jpg

thursday, 5:38 pm, it rained a bit and the sky is a nice yellow, getting redder.

i think i approach writing as the pursuit of genealogy, as the consideration of what belongs. there’s something about preservation involved—and i’m thinking of preserved tomatoes when i say this—of keeping people, creatures and situations close. at the same time, that preservation allows me to revisit and think about, or from, other places. it re-situates me.

18 jan. 2024, 7:30 am in cdmx

txe,

Reading you sprouted an infinity of words in me all at once¹. After that first look at your email, I have to say I thought about structuring a response: breaking down your sentences into items and writing coherently underneath, in a logical order. But I don’t have it in me, or at least I’m not and haven’t yet had that kind of Virginian vitality. So, I’ve decided to share with you, through this email, something of what your sentiments have brought up.

To start, I have to say that all those italics above very much relate to your story. First off, because you’ve rejected capital letters as a grammatical rule since you speak “from dissidence and the shout of capital letters is unlike us; lowercase replaces those characters that should be capitalised, according to the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy”, which I love and will loop back to in a bit, I do it by subverting word order and spacing: I don’t like “me brotaron” since it places “me” ahead of that vital verb that transcends the individual. I don’t like the space, either, as if me and the sprouting were separable entities. I write “brotáronme” as a single word that embodies a concept that also rejects the Royal Spanish Academy and the androcentric values it represents: I do not place myself ahead of the world, but rather we co-emerge. I am not separable from all that sprouts, instead we cooperate in unfragmentable units.

that said, i suppose you notice that i’m beginning to embrace your commitment to the horizontality of words, where the beginning of the word isn’t worth more, nor are nations worth more than the people who make them tangible.

also, i’d like to tell you that i always write my name in lower case (lu). i was once asked if it was for the same reason as bell hooks, because she used lower case to emphasise that she wanted to be remembered for her ideas and not for her name. i instantly smiled, and said that i really loved that policy, but i wasn’t familiar with it. rather, my reluctance to capitalise my name, i went on to explain, is because i was taught that “all proper names are capitalised”: but is there anything less proper than the name? not only because it is assigned to us without our knowing, but even because, when some choose to keep it (which is not a re-appropriation), it is always in relation to a gendered identity. and this “in relation” indicates that it is relational. plus, those of us who change it, or re-signify it, do it in relation to an identity that this assigned name does not represent, but, again, we always decide based on how we want to be recognised in the gaze of others, where this gaze also turns into our own. in short, it is metaphysically impossible for our names to be our own when they’re marked by androcentric values.

when i said all at once in reference to “sprouted in me” (“brotáronme”), it was because at different points in your story you mentioned the garden, seeds, seasons, lack of patience, pumpkins, palo borracho, seeds again, seasonality again. i felt that when you wrote that, at the same time sprouting in you were events translated on the keyboard: the timeline of the corn in the garden that you sow. corn in the context of that garden, your hands, your cells in movement, perhaps create other timelines not limited by the notion of seasons.

when i emphasised coherent and logical, it’s because we both challenge these notions that are also androcentric, that constrain what we can do/be/create and what we can’t. i feel this every time i read what you have to say about the idea of failure. the failure to resist the demands of success. i saw that you bring the queer art of failure as an injection of disruptive energy. i love that. i also think (with you) whether using the word failure doesn’t end up confining us in a dichotomy that continues to legitimise the word success. or maybe failure becomes so expansive that it makes success disappear, and then failure itself disappears. could karate be a key to that for you? you talk about practicing, that it calms you, that karate grounds you, there i also see how the mind is embodied, how the movement of your body shifts your mindsets at the same time. i looked up the word dojo, i had no idea, i’m completely ignorant about these things, and found it literally means “place of awakening”. i wonder if for you it is possible to awaken through writing. i also wonder why you usually don’t write what is important to you. how do you materialise what is? surely the garden, for example, or karate, are good answers. but without your writing, which has been with you throughout your life, from schoolwork to your current work, would you do karate in the same way? would you garden with the same movements? and what about that triangularity of karate-writing-gardening? that interaction that doesn’t admit vertices because they are all at once. because, even if you’re not doing karate, the memory of it is there when you garden, with you as you plant seeds. also when you write, in the rhythm of your fingers. but also in the content, what you think and feel when you plant and write.

i loved the preserved tomato. i think about what we don’t write and what is also preserved, like memories that make our skin crawl. isn’t it wonderful? a memory that, after all, is perhaps written all over our bodies. a non-western form of writing. perhaps karate can also be a writing in this sense. after all, our idea of writing—now that i write, speak, dream—is also androcentric and perhaps it cages us.

i see this question typed out, i can’t help but feel that i want to contribute something. a practice that for me means home anywhere in the world, and in the midst of any uneasiness always offers me a reassuring certainty, a grounding cable. you’ll see it attached.

and then air—breathe—water and earth. maybe the fire is in the movement of your body as you write. does breathing change for you when you (don’t) write?

7 pm on wednesday. i don’t reread what i wrote to you. i wait for my thursday morning to press zen. priceless thanks, txe, for this new world we are co-creating, also with kaos, the plants, karate and mate.

lu

practice to go with your question.jpg

25 jan. 2024 18:45 in bcn

thursday will be over and i won’t have written you, the week flew by. i found out that i got the hangar production grant not this monday, the monday before, as for the mastectomy, and i’m wrestling with that, and i went to a private clinic—they’re very posh here—and i’ve been trying to stop hesitating and let myself get the surgery, but there have been other things that haven’t let me sleep today and nightmares, and ce says that last night was a full moon in leo and that she slept badly too, but mine wasn’t just because of the moon and.. i slept badly and, just now, i realised it’s thursday, because i have karate in a little while, and it’s on tuesdays and thursdays that i have it in the afternoon. yesterday there was a protest here in support of the strike over there, among other things they sang the peronist anthem and the national anthem, even as it was breaking up. i chewed a lot of gum—chewing gum.

all this is an excuse because i read the email when it arrived and i need to read it again to answer it but i’m all over the place, i promise you’ll have another email from me before… as soon as possible. i’ll try to make it to practice—i was reading other definitions, i didn’t know the one for dojo, it’s interesting the terms used :)-.

a big hug and my apologies for the excuse

6 feb. 2024, 9:41 am in cdmx

txe,

i didn’t write because i didn’t want to invade your space. i’d like you to take this email as me reaching out to find out how you’re doing. no pressure, that’s not my intention.

let me tell you, i read “mastectomy” and get an adrenaline rush. i understand your anxiety (?) first-hand. i’ve been thinking about it for a while and it’s not easy for me. there are things i want, but they scare me, and they come into tension with others. but, as they say, you have to make a choice. more than once i’ve been told that that’s what “being an adult” is all about. so i hope i never become that.

when i was in Buenos Aires this january i took my mum to dinner at the Santa Evita for her birthday. we sang the peronist march with the little candles, blowing them out.

sending you a thousand hugs,

lu

8 feb. 2024, 6:17 pm in bcn

i’m going back to the email i couldn’t get to in time and i won’t be replying in bits and pieces, but i’ll be writing down a few things here, i think because of a build-up of mucus and a bit of fever—something happens to me with fever when it’s taken with a thermometer, and it makes me sad when, after a while (hours or days), i take my temperature again and the fever is gone, that it goes away without saying goodbye makes me feel a bit low. i’ll come back to this, i think—. i wanted to answer gradually because suddenly, maybe because of the slight temperature (but temperature nonetheless), i read “virginian” and i thought of virginie despentes, a little while ago i thought of her for other reasons. i think it’s really lovely what you do with “brotarónme”, although i didn’t get to reply to that email, some things have been on my mind the last few days, i went to lisbon on monday, i came back on tuesday; in portugal they conjugate like that, also in asturies, the action and the subject come together, but i hadn’t realised how everything changes and how a kind of specific situation, or situation specificity, is created.

reappropriation (or not)

i was talking to my friend about the mastectomy, about how hard it has been for me to want it this time, now that they’re giving me the money, i was scared those first few days, i slept badly, i woke up confused and questioning myself for having submitted that project. and she told me something that made me understand, or was good for me, which was that those of us who began to question our gender a long time ago, many years ago, transition slowly—or in my case, slowly transition, because i wanted it slow—the possibility of mastectomy was far away, and we learned to reappropriate, accept, coexist, or perhaps yes, re-signify ourselves—i don’t know if here “re-signify” goes together with the “ourselves”, without that space (“resignificarnos”), or should i say re-signify our body or parts that could be less comfortable, which in my case isn’t uncomfortable either—. that made me understand that i wasn’t giving myself permission for the mastectomy, because of how much, i suppose, i had tried to realise that my body wasn’t going to change too much. and i go back to the thermometer and the fact that the fever goes away and i don’t like that it doesn’t say goodbye; maybe it’s the same attachment, the same difficulty of letting go, that something is going to be pointedly missed.

today i’ve reached my limit, i’m thinking about the operating theatre and i disappeared these last few days because of a job connecting cables, setting up an installation, checking if the connectors were male or female dmx, and when i finished with that we had to rush to lisbon to pick up a friend, that’s the reason for the mucus, the fever and the limited time. yesterday i managed to start reading your book, beyond the prologue! a bit distracted and cold on the terrace of a bar, i’m now in the lovely process of going with that friend, among and with many others, to the hospital.

i’m going home to get a hot water bottle ready and crawl into bed. i owe you half of the text. thanks for sharing the mate :) a big hug.

15 feb. 2024, 9:38 am in cdmx

txe,

i’ll start by saying that you don’t owe me anything. i love our correspondence because i feel it frees me from many of those spelling rules that don’t let the feelings flow. i think of that conjugating without pause between action and subject and i fall in love with the idea of walking like that, can you imagine? being at the same time as moving, body as presence. i think i need more eastern philosophy, and i bring that up because i read about your attachment, how difficult it is to let go, and i totally identify with it.

that idea crosses my mind a lot, i can’t let go of something that many times, most of the time, makes me uncomfortable, but the consequence of letting go also makes me uncomfortable, so what to do? they say that being an adult means making a choice. i find myself repeating this again in our emails, i think what has haunted me the most for a few months now is this androcentric idea of being an adult. i choose to let go but it also means letting go of things i’ve learned, which is really tough. i say this now and i feel the beauty of (ourselves) exchanging words about (from) so many places.

i hope your friend is well, and that you feel that the fever is going away, but it will probably come back someday. that gives me peace of mind. something that i can’t apply to the idea of a mastectomy. i’m sending you empathy and wishing you happiness with the decision you make, that it is yours, and that it makes you happy. maybe we re-signify things all the time, with and without surgery. i think of friends who decided to get a mastectomy, and i feel that this is what happens to them. i don’t know if this would happen to me, the truth is, i’m not at all confident about it. rather, i never have many certainties, the only one that i have now is that i want to live differently, to learn to be calmer without it meaning boredom. to learn to enjoy myself without self-exploitation.

on tuesday i joined a gym. i hate gyms. not once have i ever like them. but i feel it’s what suits me because it’s close to home and i have plenty of time to go. i want to do something with my body. we’re always always do something, obviously. but i mean to make myself strong, to feel strong. maybe it’s because i reject the classical idea of adults. i don’t want to feel like i’m getting old and my body is getting weaker, the parts are falling off. maybe that’s also why i think about the mastectomy. i feel it’s a part of me that marks the passage of time, i can see the cells at each division, the telomeric shortening translated into a new grey hair that i found.

i end as i began: you owe me nothing, txe.

i hope you enjoy the book. i’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings.

I’m going to start working from a relaxed and consciously incarnated place after this email. thank you infinitely for making that possible. thank you for everything you share with me, and that’s how we can share the burdens that sometimes surround us.

lu

27 feb. 2024, 10:52 in bcn

hey there! i missed thursday again, although last thursday was the same thursday that i also got up the courage to send an email to my friends to tell them about the surgery and the care i’ll need.

i’ve spent the last few weeks looking at how i organise everything, dedicating time to my family, the chosen one and the one that has been with me since i can remember. i feel rushed and wanting for everything with the surgery to go slowly makes everything go fast so that i can allow for that slowness later on. did you make it to the gym? how are you? gyms are such strange places, i tried it for a while, i’ve always wanted a routine that involves moving my body, then i find it hard to stick to the routines. i’m finding it hard even to go to practice to prepare my body for the surgery, i’ve had a runny nose for three weeks, today i went home when i wanted to go to the dojo, exhausted just from dwelling on how slowly i’ve been telling you about all this. something as physical as a mastectomy is turning into conversations, when i just want to be in the workshop unable to move, with probiotics taking care of my belly and friends nearby to enjoy my altered state.

i’ll stop here, since it’s tuesday and almost 11 pm. i heard there’s a mosquito plague in buenos aires – ce is traveling there, and my parents are in rosario. hopefully i can let more out in my next email.

oh, last tuesday i did a process opening at hangar, they call it a “paratext,” and it’s done once during the residency. https://letxe.hotglue.me/abrazarconlaspiernas

i was just thinking that it wasn’t so long ago that i had written a tonne, and remembered it was for that. the link has the text that I read.

a huge hug!

29 feb. 2024 9.32 am in cdmx

helllo, txe!!

it’s always a pleasure to hear from you. and time loses its rhythm when i’m reading you. that’s because i think about slowness and speed, and how the same unit of time can feel so relative depending on expectations. thanks for that link—was that part of what wasn’t read sent in last thursday’s email to let us know about the operation? i’m sending you all the hugs until you need the healthy distance…

wow, i can feel the adrenaline of your project, the days, the anxiety about what’s to come.

i’ve been going to the gym, i’m more or less okay, with work anxieties, tired of the environment. i wish it was just the academic one, but it’s clearly the human environment too. i love certain human environments, they bring me to life, and those environments are generally, as you say, with the chosen family. other environments show the precariousness that living in a culture of violence and dispossession implies. the gym makes me feel older, that i have less and less strength and am in worse health. i also find routine so hard, phew. sorry, i think my scorpio is in control today. although it’s sunny, i want to get into it a bit, to calm this whirlpool of bad feeling.

i’ll sign off wanting to know how you’re doing, if you’re getting back to practice, if you’re finding peace in the plants.

sending you a victory hug, feeling that Buenos Aires summer that makes the mosquito invasion possible. i miss      b.aires², i think. i’m depressed by everything that’s going on, but i feel that close by i could also experience it like the people who are there who i love. i would like to let go of the guilt.

huge kiss and have a good start to your friday.

lu

7 mar. 2024, 1:23 in bcn

thursday again, i’m back to practice, and today i’ll go even though it’s at the same time as the night march. today, i’ll tell my karate friends about the project and that, after the 19th, i won’t be able to go until i can take the underground again without fear of getting bumped.

i’m in the process of emptying the workshop, partly to prepare it to be a bit of a recovery room and space, and also to take out things i’m no longer using and won’t be able to move to my house when my residency at hangar is over. i like seeing how it mutates, very gradually, into a space where i can spend the post-operative period. while i’m emptying the workshop and filling it with food and clothes, i’m also getting messages from friends and friends of friends who have had mastectomies. this morning, i listened to an audio message from someone i don’t know, telling me about her first month post-op. these seem like very kind gestures. yesterday, i went to the clinic where they will operate—or i get an operation, or i will let them operate on me, or they will operate a change. they did a blood test, an electrocardiogram, and a chest x-ray. i like going through this now; i don’t care if the person operating the x-ray machine sees me with my tits, but for her, it’s important that i take off my clothes and put on a gown in the little room where you can change clothes, with the door closed. i went in, and they took my details with my id card, then another person asked me by what name i wanted to be called, crossed out the name on the card, and wrote “txe” underneath. i’m thinking about formaldehyde, about preserving the supposed waste, more out of “just in case” than a sense of attachment. as the countdown gets shorter, i think i feel more like preserving those glands and that fat, and i don’t know if anything else, with me for a little while.

yesterday carol wrote to us, i haven’t thought about how we can end this, or if we do it, whether it will be an end. but maybe we can find a way to edit and get this ready for publication? i’ll give some thought to the how.

a big, strong hug!

13 mar. 2024, 8:31 in cdmx

(le)txe,

i’m a day early. tomorrow it will be impossible to sit down for long. something i actually like, because not moving physically makes it harder to elaborate and experience different mental states.

wow, how beautifully you describe everything. i’m touched by the collective support surrounding you. i want to transmit that supportive energy from this side too: from this side of the ocean; from this side of empathy; from this side, with my tits intact. i suppose you’re expectantly waiting; i hug you tight, tight now while you can still receive such hugs, as you said.

i think it’s beautiful that you can keep whatever you want, with or without formaldehyde, as part of your body’s memory.

i’m sending you lots of love and affection for the week ahead.

yes, carol wrote to us. i have no idea what to do with this correspondence…hahahahaha. i’m open to suggestions (?). i thought of presenting the emails back and forth, but do we need to edit them? will they take up too much space? i worry about transferring the ethereal to paper form. let’s see what happens. anyway, i confess, i have full confidence in her.

a huge kiss!

lu

21 mar. 2024, 4:29 in bcn

thursday! sitting down to write is one of the many (so many) things i can still do. there are many others that now require other arms, and it’s nice to live like this and to know how (and be able to) ask for help, and for those wishes for extended arms to be fulfilled. it’s about having the patience between, for example, wanting to reach for something and having that something come to you, and having to go through its materialisation in words, to be heard, for the message to arrive, and for it to be realized until the thing—whatever it is, even if it’s a bottle of water—makes it into my hands. i feel like a t-rex; i know i can move, but i don’t want to separate my elbows from my body, and my shoulders rise, i suppose, as the body’s defensive reflex after two cuts and a few hours of induced sleep. i’m purely on drugs to avoid pain and infection, while trying probiotics to keep the little bacterial companions happy with me. there was formaldehyde for a while, but they didn’t let me keep it. there seem there are photos. i have the feeling that the body is holding onto that mourning, those cuts, and those relocations. there is a determination and a willingness that i don’t control, driving me to sit, stand, walk, and do much more than i thought i could. today, i will spend some time on the tatami to get into those new movements, gradually and carefully.

I like to imagine that I’m changing the movements i’ve learned to follow a daily routine that i feel comfortable in.

if you want, we can end it soon and consider it done (up to here, without having to formally end it)

a strong, little armless hug!!

22 Mar. 2024, 12:26 pm in cdmx

txe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was going to write you without sticking to the schedule, because I wanted to wish you luck (?) with the surgery… but my fictitious Capricorn didn’t allow it: now it seems I’m fully embodying my Aquarian reality :)

I’m sending you much affection, love and open arms, to add to all the others!!

I’m moved by this relearning of the most everyday things, whew. Those new experiences can really energise you.

Bear hug,

lu

And yes: let’s end like this!!!!

1. Note: In the original, the author uses “brotáron(me)” instead of “me brotaron” (“brotar” means to sprout; here the author uses it as a reflexive verb). By inverting the pronoun and verb and eliminating the space, the author subverts the language, playing with the Spanish grammar rule that typically places the reflexive pronoun before the conjugated verb.
2. Buenos Aires