Poems and Texts

“Gelatinous Mass Manifesto, partially an essay on Gilligan’s POPULAR UNREST” by Lara Durback

Gelatinous Mass Manifesto, partially an essay on Gilligan’s Popular Unrest

When you trap them one on one in a private room they are very different.

It could be their partner at home, it could be the psychologist, the single person that they are in an intimate room with.

In this psychologist-type configuration, a person explains oneself to a person.

They experience themselves as a worker: “I used to be an account manager” “I had to drop my volunteer position at the daycare.” There’s something very earnest. It’s just the person and their emotions.

They are very markedly not this when they are with others. The earnestness does not exist.

The earnestness being the ugly frozen moments of multiple frames of photographs of a person’s face in motion: the earnestness not being a person.

They don’t need it. And it’s better this way. Even group therapy would be better. They would be able to watch one another change.

I am noticing that the people who are getting killed by the mysterious knife are people who primarily see themselves as workers.

(Someone will say that I am against succeeding but that is not true. I am against a person seeing oneself as a worker.)

The scenes when they are eating pizza together and sharing it, cheering as they pull from the pizza pie circle.
They barely know each other, they have built a bond.

They look in each other’s eyes.

They take walks together, they see one another differently than others see them.

But anyone could see them.

There is nothing special about it, except that when this occurs often enough on multiple occasions, closely occurring, the time will seem special.

No person is special.

Only configurations of time and space can be special.

Lara Durback

Lara Durback is a poet who has been living in Oakland for 10 years. She has published books collectively under NoNo Press and Mess Editions. You can see her printed and/or written work in Drift Magazine, Mrs. Maybe, Bombay Gin, the UK journal Hi Zero, and Tripwire. Her archiving work is online at deepoakland.org. In 2013, with designer Andrew Kenower, she produced the letterpress publication Field Work: Poems on the Occasion of Mark diSuvero at Crissy Field for SFMOMA. She has taught a letterpress printing course at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. Lara is a founding member of the new press collective Material Print Machine at the Omni Commons in Oakland, https://omnicommons.org. Her book is forthcoming from Publication Studio Oakland: psoakland.com.

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