Parallel Horizon Invisible Horizontal

September 2026

1. On sickness & the intangible

2. Art review, dreaming & world making

3. Meditations on the current cultural pulse

   On Sickness & the Intangible

_{I’ve been sick two times in the last month and it has gotten me thinking… One thought of course, is that I should stop smoking cigarettes and probably start working out (I have been running and off the smokes for a week now)!}

_{Yesterday however, I had the thought that there is something transcendent about being sick.}

_{It calls on the vulnerable body inside that seems to be just as tender as it ever was, as if you’re back to being a child. It’s like taking a temporary visit to that state of being and realizing how precious and powerful your body is. Resulting in an overwhelming anticipation to get better— At which point, when all is resolved, health feels particularly crisp and clear— like something you’ve never tasted before.}

_{Aside from the satisfying high of physical well being though, I tend to also emerge into some sort of newly grounded mindset after getting over an illness. Maybe it’s a resurfaced reverence for my mortality. Or maybe it’s that very contact you recently made with the vulnerable condition that always lives inside you.}

_{The child inside is a living memory. There are certain sensations throughout a cold that send me straight back to childhood. I experience these same sensations after a good cry too… The theme here feels sinus related. Anyhow.}

_{Sometimes the sensation of sniffling feels like this grand fusing of the emotional and the physical, with the power to send you back in time with real fervor. Yesterday I experienced it by feeling catapulted to a memory where I was waterboarded in a pool, around seven or eight. That sniffle induced images of blue and crisp aqua with purple dashes of fractured light all around me. My whole body felt so small and fragile in that moment. That’s the thing about being sick though, your rational mind seems thin. It’s as if you’re living in a daze where  the dream world and reality feel inseparable.}

_{Other moments where I experience this melding of emotion and image driven simulation, are the gentle instances between consciousness and a very profound dream. Often I am only capable of gathering a few feelings… Those being a strong conjuring of shapes and colors and sometimes sounds. But never words, and hardly a linear narrative. I suppose thats what’s different about this sniffling experience. It’s more physical, and calls on lived experiences that may have been long forgotten or buried. I am interested in these quiet connections. Links between things that side by side in their isolated forms appear to have no correlation…}

_{Imagine this: There are three pedestals before you. One with a huge statue of a nose, one with a miniature pool, and one with a statue of adult feet planted on a fluffy carpet. These components made up this transporting experience for me, but individually don’t have much directly in common without the power of free association. There is a whole world beneath the logical and it’s aching to be seen. I think it’s quite possible it’s a very beautiful one too.}

Art review, dreaming & world making

_{Shifting gears here.}

^{I have been really inspired by the idea of creating within a kinetic collective energy… So when my friend RUTH made this incredible eight-foot tall chair sculpture near the end of August and displayed it at a vermicu.lt writing collective reading, I was jolted with adoration and inspiration. First off, a few words for the chair as well as for this writing collective.}

^{Sculpture titled High Chair (Bambi) is an 8 ft tall wooden chair made of reclaimed bits of wooden chair legs, all screwed together in a precarious leaning, wobbly foundations that gives you the impression the thing has just learned to stand. According RUTH  the idea for the chair came to her in a dream and the very next day she was compelled to create it. She was assisted in assembling this vision by ScrapsApparel. Two beautiful vivacious women building a dreamy surrealist chair upon lighting striking inspiration? Yes please.}

^{Now, I can’t speak for RUTH  but the peculiar shape and origin of this chair being from a dream reminds me of similar impressions left to me during those “gentle instances between consciousness and a very profound dream”. And giving these peculiar things attention and energy to grow and take up considerable space in your reality, that is myth building! Giving the magical and absurd life. Making something previously abstract real.}

^{And as I am writing on this, my hope is that I am giving it a bed to rest and grow in, because that act creates webs. Creates a map. Creates a world. Next month I will be sending out an essay I am writing on world building. Perfect transition to talking about vermicu.lt.}

_{Vermicu.lt is a writing collective centered around the act of world building. Each member of the collective takes on a character within a dystopic world, and writes from that character’s point of view. At the reading members went up one by one and read off poems they wrote stemming from distillations of experience in this imaginary world. Individual creations becoming threads woven into a wider network of imagination. This is the kinetic energy I am talking about.}

_{There is no novelty. That is dead. Everything is created some way or another through feeding off of outside input. Now on one hand you could gather large swooping armfuls of inspiration from current popular visual culture or perhaps more ancient ones. But when you realize everything is changed and influenced by something, the ability to be tactful in choosing which influences you pull from and create a bed to grow form, that ability gives birth to something that feels sacredly unique. And it is the sacred that I would like to grow to cultivate and make more room for in my life.}

_{Which brings me to the piece I created. It stands as sort of a shrine to these concepts I have been ruminating over. Layered sensation, replica, impression, cultivation, giving life to imaginary worlds, the list goes on…. The botanicals roughly imaged are plants I have taken notice of over the last month. A hanging branch, a shrub of wild sage. These things bring me down to earth and in these moments of noticing, I feel caressed. I like to pretend we speak to each other.}

_{Then the chairs. On the right is a hand drawing I lovingly doodled on the patio at Stories while doing what I do best, striking up conversation with whoever is sitting nearest to me. That was the the day after I viewed the installation for the first time. It lingered for me obsessively.}

_{And on the left a watercolor impression, only preserving it’s essential shape, echoing the convention of impression and repetition, and the alchemy that occurs when these things are transmuted, muted and changed, but importantly, continue to live.}

_{I love the idea that in my small way I can create my own world just by making something. Something that relies on the very specific context of this strange pocket of people and artists that exists in the wider ever-saturated city of Los Angeles. I take my walks. I do my thinking. I have my conversations. And it is in this mulling over that I have found a little magic and joy in making my life feel like it’s worth living. Pouring my heart into a landscape that exists only because I make it so.}

Meditations on the current cultural pulse

_{Lastly I was going to end this month’s letter here but recent events have made me particularly reflective and I wanted to share what was coming up for me. For whatever it’s worth.}

_{Like many I’m sure, I have been thinking about the Cornell 7. It brings up so much. From the wave of reactions to reflecting on the very act we are reacting to… And the grief that arises there. The immense grief— To the punishment or lack-there-of. To what lingers. To the larger powers at play and the whispers and stitches that bind us together. There is a lot of anger. There is hurt. There is heart yearning and mourning.}

_{There is anger.}

_{There is anger.}

_{There is anger.}

_{What is anger?} 

_{What is its function?}

_{What is its power?}

_{What is the lifespan of anger?}

_{What is the lifespan of anger?}

_{What is the lifespan of anger?}

_{There is a lot of talk about how the perpetrators should be punished. There is a wide shared reflection on the system’s inability to punish effectively, as well as on the people who have the power to do so. Yes, this system will not meet our moral and ideological needs. There is no quick fix to that and when reflecting on how the midterms are coming up, I think of how a diluted version of concern for these cultural wounds is cast as identity politics and intertwined into liberal campaigns, while they use those dilutions to conceal the sustained perpetuation of oligarchy and exploitation. While obversely conservative campaigns straight up victim blame and then, proceed to do the very same thing.}

_{The fact of the matter is what has been breached is sacred. A defiling of something has been defiled for a long time and we should not waste a second of our collective force in shocked reaction to the way this atrocity has been addressed. The sacred was taken out of politics hundreds of years ago. So why should we expect politicians to govern or protect it now?}

_{Until dominating powers are reacquainted with the necessary respect for these types of things, this work is for the people. And it has been the work of the people since the birth of futility. We cultivate and tend to the culture. We sustain culture. They cannot take that away from us. That work is done through social commitment. That work is done through care. And sometimes care doesn’t look like warm milk and a hug. Sometimes it looks like extreme social inconvenience and uncomfortable conversations.}

_{What is the lifespan of anger?}

_{This question, posed by professor and writer Ocean Vuong lingers heavily— like a blanket of fog at dusk, prominent and thick but with the ability to remain penetrable by perceptions, all the while grounding your body to the atmosphere in a sensory experience that causes the upmost presence.}

_{Vuong speculates that while the function of anger is to stir up conviction towards action, it quickly collapses without sustained fuel. It is also incredibly depleting. SO depleting. And there is fuel for anger in every corner of culture right now. Coaxing and begging us to fall to exhaustion. But if space is allowed and chance will have it, there is a second wave.}

_{As speculated by Voung, the second wave to anger is care. We need to be protective and discerning of our hearts and minds to be sure we reach the second wave!}

_{Now one may think of action as something quite fiery or punchy. But to me anger is only a spark of conviction. The action lies in care. The sustained fuel I speak of that lives in all corners of our current culture leaves us paralyzed and locked in a place of conviction corroding the path towards the second wave of care.}

_{Back to the sacred. Care is sacred. Truth is sacred. Truth is care. Truth is love. Care is love in action. Care is the lesson we learn from anger. Lessons are truths… Anger is love…?}

_{Oh boy, it all feels so circular…}

_{Okay, okay. But how do we move forward? How do we tend to the culture with care? How do we stand as figures of accountability in our communities?}

_{These are questions I think we should all be asking relentlessly.}

_{Some things are clearer than others though, and that is we must squash misogynistic language before it has a chance to become action. We must hold each other accountable daily. We must be discerning in the way we build our worlds together— and that starts with the interactions between one another. That starts with language.}

_{The way we use language is magical and powerful. It can either be a protection of what is sacred or an exploition of it. Language is material. But no amount of language can ever do justice to an experience. And an experience can never be expressed or diluted into pure information. It shouldn’t have to be.}

_{Which is also why the act of defending one’s experience with assault through language feels endlessly impossible. Because these things were never meant to have to be rationalized on that level. They are simply the sacred defiled. Dignity and trust betrayed over and over and over again in our culture without the batting of an eyelash until one person feels they live so far above the rules of man that they think they can play god. That they feel the rules do not apply to them.}

_{I pray you all can cultivate care today.}

_{First and foremost care for the parts of you that have been wounded. Anger and anxiety are only protections against grief. Grieve! Hold yourself in the hurt look up at the sky and feel it all.}

_{Then care for your friends, care for your lovers, care for your siblings. Hold them in their grief and in their hopelessness. Rebuild the bonds between each other. Rekindle a reverence for intimacy and the body. Protect that reverence with your life.}

_{It is the silent that holds the strongest binding in the web of culture. What is withheld becomes normal enough to not acknowledge. What is not spoken maintains its potency. We must expose the ill ways in which we relate to each other with such blinding visibility that they loose their power completely. Pay attention.}

_{With love,}

_Ayeel