ALL IN FOREVER by Shanti Hands on lydon frank lettuce
ALL IN
FOREVER
This piece was so quintessentially lydon, combining their educational background in psycholinguistics, their passions for wrestling, philosophy, poetry, and their art practice, and the intensity of it felt like a shout. A controlled, quiet shout.
The literal ton of dirt that took hours to carry and assemble looked like the platonic ideal of pile, a perfect pinch by god, misplaced. A giant’s tablespoon of cumin on the turf. The sign on it says “I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME” so of course I want to kiss it. I was sitting on the floor in front of it with Carlisle, a friend from out of town, a poet with whom I often spend late nights on the phone struggling to describe gender.
I want to talk about the impression of language
How it presses into us, how we might press into it – body to body – the impression of the spaces between what is said, what can be said, what you actually mean, and what comes into being as their residue – no space between.
Forgive me.
lydon, in a large button-down shirt, jots down educational text about language. “How it presses into us, how we might press into it,” they write in chalk on the white walls. It’s impossible to watch them without the mound looming in the foreground, but we’re not talking about it. For now, it’s these two contrasting aesthetics: erudite – button down, definitions and statements, and dirt – base, filth, and solid, real.
lydon writes that what comes into being as a result of language is “residue”. Dirt is RESIDUE. it’s funny to think that the big pile of dirt that is center stage and spotlit is residual, and it’s funny to think that the actions that are a result of words are residual.
SPEECH ACTS
Referring is a collaborative process – a conceptual pact – temporary, fleeting, yes – we are suspended in saying
And something always happens, even if it doesn’t
Example: I promise you
Everyone is subject to “Truth conditions”
(meaningful =/= true)
I perform something
You bring it into being
Words do things –
Though sometimes not enough
“Referring is a collaborative process” makes me think about conceptual lineage, the way that we consume each other when we read each others’ writings or hear each other or see each other or sense each other at all, and the way we regurgitate each other with our writing and the sensations we give others. “Blurry,” lydon calls it, “like who's enveloping who”
I love the emotive examples lydon provides. “I forgive you” “i promise you”. For a while, every time I hung out with lydon, I would cry and then feel refreshed. lydon has a way of tapping into feelings with careful word choices – delicate, like chalk – pulling unexpected truths out of mundane conversations. The scenes implied by the examples pull the examination of language from the theoretical to the very real, base, solid, dirt.
“The||A” distinction: about a mutual knowledge
What is ever mutual? (plagued by a ‘mis’)
Speech -acts- Performs
Locution: what is said (form, words, etc)
Illocution: what is meant (meaning, understanding, receptivity, between you and i, finding it together)
Perlocution: What happens as a result (action – what is brought into being)
Example #1
I don't want to hurt you
I am hurting you
I hurt you (active)
Example #2
I want to impress myself upon something – no space between
I need to feel the force of my own impact
I am going all in
As lydon writes “I need to feel the force of my own impact” i think about how i want to feel my impact. I want to feel capable of impact. It is very easy these days to feel hopelessly small and incapable. Like our shouts have fallen on deaf ears and i can’t imagine having enough hope to open my mouth anymore. “I am going all in” says the chalk on the wall, and i feel that It’s almost unthinkable to go all in right now.
Then lydon stands up exposing their pink knee pads. They drop the professorial getup and dart around in a shiny wrestling singlet (base, filth, solid). They size up the mound and dive in head first (longing). Guy in a singlet. Big pile of dirt. The guy wrestles the dirt. It’s immediately messy and it looks hard, harder than i expected. Thighs bulging, striving, sweat making mud. This is satisfaction. Satisfaction carries meaning. lydon sums it up, “Temptation, fulfillment, reward.”
The delicacy of the chalk on the walls, the careful choice of words, and then the body slamming into the pile, like the impact of words, sometimes clumsy, sometimes damaging. The satisfaction of lydon slamming into the pile is a somatic interpretation of the way communication feels harder than you thought at first. Talking about pain is like slamming into a pile of dirt.
Something unnaturally bright appears in the pile, lydon wrestles their words out – a neon piece of paper embedded in the dirt, that they read aloud:
Offense, defense, and the smeary spot, the mysterious third thing, “outside of the legible binary of power press relations… belonging in suspension…neutral as the possibility,” describing the way the “third thing” is not a mix of a and b but an independent entity. That’s the stuff that makes this feel like lydon is exposing their brain, trying to show us how to feel what they feel. It feels like an explanation of lydon’s motivation for life. lydon yearns for the smeary spot? lydon feels kinship to the smeary spot, i think. Deep kinship. I feel kinship for the smeary spot too. lydon and I have had dreamy conversations before about nonbinary in a mathematical, computational sense, like analog computers, or the excitement of a three-legged table.
Something I feel about lydon is that lydon lives in a way that is easier when you are always doing it. The pleasure of slowness prefers long-scale commitment, when you are slower and more pleasureful more often it is easier to tap into it, when you let it slip it is harder to get back.
Stillness is easier to maintain than achieve, like focus and clarity. These things require focus and commitment, going ALL IN. lydon’s commitment to slowness is part of the performance, the time spent sitting on the floor in front of the dirt is essential for the satisfaction of the dive into it. I asked lydon about their dedication to slowness, and they said “I find this commitment to be a sisyphusian task (so, i guess, yes to long-term commitment.) I think my art practice is one of the few places where i am really permitted this slowness (and even still, i fight my own languoriousness because of capitalism, productivity, the virtue trap, etc.)”
I know i’m not alone among people who know lydon who envy their steadfastness. They have a mental clarity that comes from intention and concentration. Their house is full of notes, and many are about effort– putting in effort every day. Choosing to put in effort.
Choosing effort and choosing pain feel the same to me. But lydon’s saying, take it slow, which i think means giving yourself only the wantable amount of pain– “not acting out of reflex or going too hard.” It has been a foul summer. Burning hot every day. The air is perpetually wet. I’ve been tired every day. Everyone’s tired every day. I know lydon feels it too. lydon’s reaction to the hot wet misery was: they started running. They quit smoking. I think they said, it’s a painful time, let it be painful. How can i use pain?
From the resting position, lydon slowly started shoving the pile into place with their back, and then turned over and, while reading aloud to us, rebuilt their opponent. Rebuilding your opponent is love. It’s commitment to entanglement.The idea that lydon introduces, that electron repulsion is as necessary as attraction, is spiritual and ethical.
Relationships that have ended are still alive and whole. We can never stop relating. Any two points indicate a distance whether or not they want to.
Essential repulsion, essential dirt.
Essential effort, essential pain. .
lydon describes “a belonging outside of the Law” with a Capital L, that lydon (lowercase l) indicates by holding it over their forehead. It’s a reminder of how restrictive and unnatural a legal system can be. Fluidity, choosing not to solidify, is not a productive or profitable option, but it’s inevitable, an essential part of life. The command to solidify is bullshit. A vitruvian ideal is comforting but physically impossible. Certainty, in it’s very utterance, untangles itself.
lydon’s special phrases are like religious chants. All-in forever. All in this together. And per se and neither and per se and nor. I want to shout them. I want to whisper them through a peephole.
They flop languidly onto the pile, which is smeary and neutral. Not offensive, but not defensive with the way it disassembles itself upon impact. ‘Foe’ is a support position.
lydon’s piece, for months after, gave Carlisle and I more language to talk about the challenge of language. Carlisle made an observation that stuck with me, that “it was a great representation of the creative process, digging through this dirt to find slips of paper, and sometimes they'd uncover one slip of paper and it wasn't ready, it wasn't in the right order, so they had to bury it again, kind of like when an idea comes to you but it's not the right time or you don't have the knowledge or the experience to properly contextualize or express it.”
“we stopped studying the night sky for directions
if someone said
we made it up
planet earth isnt real
we would try to verify
try to be sure
critics are the evidence
that we do not trust ourselves
your imagination is asking for parole
what is your verdict warden?
Try to always remember
the calendar made of light
our ancestors followed
to pass the year”
Going all in, panting, dirty, bruised and scraped, reminds me of how durable I am. Ache reminds you that you can push hard enough to ache.
The CA Conrad poem lydon recited from memory reminds me of pivotal and heartfelt conversations i’ve had with lydon about science, what and who it’s for, and how to do it, and how to feel it. It is their commitment to embodiment, the ritualising of experience, just in another form entirely.
The delicacy of the chalk on the walls, the careful choice of words, and then the body slamming into the pile, like the impact of words, sometimes clumsy, sometimes damaging
Carlisle described it as “this beautiful balance of the pleasure of tension and release, but also the effort, the strife, the exhaustion. like why do we bother saying anything if it's not going to come out exactly the way that it is? why do we bother exploring our identities that can never be defined? but it's that act of exertion and will itself that like, creates the world."
I feel like i’m always asking lydon how they manage to put in so much effort in existence, and I think this piece is the answer. It’s not about winning, it's about effort. Effort for effort. Being a wampish wimp. A losing offense breaks a sweat not to win but to live. Choosing a losing fight opens you up to more reasons to fight than winning. “Gratitude to have a position worth defending, something to wrestle with, something to break a sweat over.” Carlisle adds. Being willing to be a losing offense is a great way to convince yourself to try in life even when it feels so miserably awful, so impossible. being a loud loser, a wampish wimp, a losing offense, it's related to voicing the silenced, defending against large forces—part of american propaganda and economics is this idea that you should bet on winners, and if you don't it's your personal failure.
Now that the feverish weather has broken, i find myself wanting to commit to ritual. to push myself every day to feel the push. it's a relief, to want to try enough to lose again. and it's also so scary. I’m still nowhere near going all in, but it’s something.
"the limitations of language, but also the joys of those limitations, and how that connects to queerness and the joy and frustration and physical struggle of navigating the space between.. the utterance.. and where meaning is made.” says Carlisle.
I asked Lydon if it felt good to go all in. to wrestle the pile. “I wish it felt better. [it’s like quitting smoking]” exhausting, i guess. A good feeling made of bad feelings? “it felt good, but like, it fucking hurt.” Trying to move something that isn’t moving, and feeling it pushing back at the moment of impact, like it’s alive, while at the same time it disassembles itself. This perfect centipede crawled across the mound, who lydon referred to after as “my costar” Lydon said they could feel the composting, the decaying, the changing of matter as they were grappling it. They added, “And i mean, for the record, it felt really good”
