Dinsdag Werknemer 7am-11am
by Collette Rayner
On Tuesdays, I have to clean the mats, so I make today a Tuesday. There are four of them, padded two feet from the ground in a 700m2 hall. They need to be cleaned every day in a particular motion, to appease the chalk, which makes it obvious when you’ve missed a patch.
As I clean, the repeated action allows me meditative access into the basin of the mind where words float on thought and thought on sound and sight (1).
The basin is the deepest part of the mind, where all neural pathways drain. It’s a grey matter container, sometimes just out of reach. With deep sides to prevent ideas from running out, information froths and sloshes in the rotational currents, offering new positions to examine and formulate free-floating associations.
Every time I begin the same way—by cursing the thought my employer propelled into reality, about the time allotted for the tasks at hand. He based the work pace on his body, and the pay follows that pace. The body that demands this is trained as an acrobat. So, in the morning my routine begins with a silent articulation to myself, chastising the acrobatic body that I am held comparable to through paid labor.
The gym needs to be vacuumed intensively on Tuesdays, and I make today a Tuesday like any other. As the vacuum moves over the first mat, I question whether my silent self has anything interesting to offer, other than self-indulgence. I think about whether it has an accent or any language at all other than neural impulses and a bit of gut.
When I write in the first person, I am afraid to stand alone (as alone as I stand in the gym) in the context of the obstacles and objects I have experienced. I am afraid that others won’t follow me there.
I fear it as a mode of performance which could lead me down an uncomfortable path to the exposure of my insecurities. I have only been able to harness my ‘I’ by buffering my experiences with a time delay. Only then can I sit down to write, but not before I have formed the premise in my mouth and trialed it on my own terms in conversational recitation. In this mode, I try to find a mechanism to, ‘observe oneself, detach from oneself and objectify oneself, whilst insisting in this of abstraction, on having a significant voice’ (2). When the distance is right, an objective handle appears, and I can feel like I’ve worked an encounter through and made sense of it on paper.
I think about the work of a writer I admire, and how she composes the same narrative voice in every text—so that her writings are bodybuilding, with the reader carrying the knowledge of the past works into the new, to frame a deeper contextual understanding of what drives the authority of their account.
In this rhythm, my silent articulation continues and I think in conversations: when a friend felt compelled to write without interruption or sleep for 48 hours after reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, and when another gushed over a desire to install a door in the female mouth (3).
There is a thing I think of as lovers’ hum, when two people spend too much time together and start to sound the same.
As I dip back into the basin in my head, I devise short stanzas, visualizing the line breaks which I mutely mouth into the empty hall.
My silent self composes, hands-free:
Listen to couple talk and know it is a real thing
Whereby co-expression is given
voice through each other’s words.
Read the verbing of Cleopatra’s “he word’s me” (4)
and feel small stretches of your vocal cords come
against a vibration like old lovers used.
Listen and hear the hum of you
coming up like somebody else.
As I continue to vacuum, I think about where there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still is a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought (5).
When writing first entered my practice, I wrote like I read, trying to use the literary devices of others to contain what I wanted to say. I tried to dissolve the edges of their containers to give me more room to make my points, and, when I couldn’t do so, restricted what I wanted to say. The compositions would fight for the space I gave them and the voice that I wrote in began to sound like an imitation of someone else entirely.
It became apparent that my writing practice was constricted by caution, and I doubled back over past works to determine how this had manifested. I wrote in character to avoid the possibility of encountering ‘I’, the self-discloser—the traitor to my private thoughts. I pause over bringing myself into the mix.
When I feel I have produced something that satisfies me, it is usually at night. I cannot work in the same space that I live, so when this happens, it is because the journey home has provided a distance that in turn activates a bodily reaction that I find hard to downplay. I feel like the text is reverberating with me. When I leave, I can feel it sitting where I left it, vibrating in the dark. For the rest of the night, I will be slightly nauseated and obsessive about returning to it, simply because at that moment, I am convinced that the text is now operating on its own as a machine. It works independently of me. On these occasions, I wake to find myself lying without conscious direction, on the side of my bed closest to the studio, anxious to see if the machine is still running in the morning.
I am brought back to my task by the dryness of my hands, now toughened and coated in chalky talc. This is arid employment which undoes any morning greenness, but the mechanics of recurrent motion make the units of passing time more arable. I find that I am dunked in and out of the basin, drenched and then parched, in oscillation between physical action and thought. The gym receives a surface clean through the displacement of dust as my contemplations take a deep bath. There cannot be sanitation without fluid. There must be moisture before you can be clean; you must cross water before you can be rid of a scent trail, or folktale tropes of the devil.
It therefore follows that anything which has been thoroughly rid of the unwanted must have passed through a stage of dampness to get there.
In the modern world, sanitation manifests in a consistency thicker than water, due to industrial preference for something more viscous and in control. Cleaning can be aggressive if the aim is forcible removal. There is a decided chemical effort to strip and eradicate, with the inherently violent act of annihilating bacterial colonies through the weaponization of a substance (a substance that will always deform under stress).
My right hand, the leading hand, has taken the brunt of the momentum and blistered in protest. This weekly occurrence will have healed by the arrival of next Tuesday and will repeat until the eagerly awaited point of callus.
At the end of the morning, I blow my nose to signal the end of my shift. The removal of any particles from the floor that may have taken up residence in my body has become a ritual, the final stage of cleaning.
I remember the childhood parable of nose-picking in which the nostril was the gateway to the brain and that those who ventured too far would reach grey matter. I do not want the dry of the gym to absorb the wet insides of my head, so I expel all potential loudly, to toll the end of the body of work.
1 Hurston, Z.N. 1999. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York. Harper Collins. p.29.
2 Meunier, K. 2012. Self, stake, disclosure. Maastricht. Jan van Eyck Academie. p.10.
3 Carson, A. 1996. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York. Random House Inc. p.121.
4 Shakespeare, W. 1994. Anthony & Cleopatra. Cambridge. Act 5, scene 2.
5 Hurston, Z.N. 1999. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York. Harper Collins. p.29.
Collette Rayner (b. Dundee 1990) is a visual artist and writer living in the Netherlands and Scotland. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and graduated with merit from MFA at The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2018. She is the recent recipient of Droom and Daad funding to produce new work.