ON GIRL/S, GENDER, NEURO/QUEERNESS, SEX AND HOW WRITING IS AN ORGASM

blush / river / fox is the startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren. The collection is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. In this original piece accompanying the book, Anna contemplates the intersections of the world girl, neuro/queerness, and writing.

there is something with Girl. writing blush had to do with Girl. there is something with Girl that is like a ghost in me. the ghost is like a pretend and a play it is like a soft hurting. there is a ghost of Girl tickling pleasurely unpleasantly, and i want to fly away from it still want to be close…

when writing i always find myself writing about Mean Girls. The meaning ot Mean Girls to me is Mean as an act of unkindness unhelpfulness violence maybe. but it is also the Meaning. what Girl means. what Girls mean. i know nothing about it but i have a strong feeling for Girls. i try to write and explain but words slippers into words. Girl can only be, can only be understood in the form of poetry.

i think meanness is sometimes a kind of love. i think sometimes it is not.

i remember following the Girls as they walk in the school. i place my body next to bodies of Girls.

i remember being next to Girls and they said they would not say anything to me until i said something and i said HELLO. but then the Girls said that was wrong because HELLO does not actually Mean anything.

i love Girl.         i feel a fear and that is love.                     i write Girl.

Girl is a word and a world that i don’t understand it is trying and tiring and hatred and love

writing is being obsessive about Girls. it is feeling passion for Girls it is having Girl as my special unspecial unlimited limited interest. writing is a being of closeness i try placing myself next to Girl. Girls are surrounding me, calling me silently violently shyly and badly.

I have two texts that helps me with this:

Carolyn Allen writes : EROTICS OF CITATION, in a book called FOLLOWING DJUNA. it is lesbian writing as writing-love and loving through text

Elspeth Probyn writes about horses and Girls in one text and about Be-Longing,

(there are traces of these texts in blush /river / fox.)

BE-LONGING is being as longing for the lost things and that never was is a being that is not not but still is is a being as a verbe and a subject and a longing as an endless movement of rivers.

in my first book of poetry i write pistasche. pistasche is the pistachio flavoured ice cream. in the poem the ice cream is the trace of spilled ice cream on a pink sandal that i inherited from one of the Johannas, she was Girl, her name had my name inside, she was older then me, i don’t know if the stain was actually ice cream or if the ice cream was pistachio but it is my favourite ice cream and imagining it was a thing she had once eaten with the shoe made the shoe into something i could have and i feel a comforting feeling when eating pistachio ice cream it is also green. then pistachio is also a nut i once ate many nuts and the night after i was very sick and it was terrible so the nuts was like puking but the ice cream like comfort and it was so confused i think it was like Girl like eating Girl.

when i was hospitalized as a teenager i was once told i was not allowed to run in the corridors, wearing only my t-shirt because it would upset the teenage boys. i think it felt like i could not understand why. i think later that the adults saying this meant that my half-naked body was half-naked and that it would not be good for boys to see, because i was Girl. i sometimes think i was hospitalized for being Girl and also for not being Girl but Girl Interrupted and Girl Glitch and Girl Fail.

there is something with the not understanding Girl, and i try to think of my autistic artistic obsessive compulsory un-understanding of Girl as a resistance and proof that sexes and genders are things in a making and autistics are the queerest of creatures.

i found WORDS when to understand my failed Girl and i tried them like this:

i started to think i was a lesbian because i could not stop thinking about Girl and

i started think trans because i could not understand my body as Girl, but more Girl than woman and more old then adult more lump and cat and slug than human.

i started thinking asexual when i felt i did not recognize the things i read about as sex when i was trying to do. i had a boyfriend and i had a girlfriend and i had a loveperson and so. but i felt like it was so strange i did not know what to do.

i started thinking everything is sex because i felt much more of the things i earned for that i read about in books in other things than sex. like i find orgasm in Words. is it euforia. i feel words in body. Words are not –                                     because they are.

i was bored by sex. very boring thing. and i also don’t know what it is, what is sex and what is not. i think sometimes this makes med o things that i am supposed to feel bad about or hurt by, even when i don’t. and i sometimes don’t know if i do. what is hurt and what is not, what is bad and good and not.

i have tried to have what i think is sex (?). in different versions. with Girls and boys and Others. it makes me feel sad lonely evil and strange. i don’t feel anything totally uninteresting unpassionate unobsessive.

but then i write. writing about sex is better then sex. maybe it is hübris but i write the best sex, in my opinion. with myself writing i have sex.

sometimes i find a word that is making my mind. dissolve. implode in an orgasm that is brain is heart is a furry creature biting.

Sid Ghosh writes something like this :

Queer is being so free it scares you.

i read this and i felt : yes. and i feel fear of free and i love this line i want to thank Sid for helping me understand queerness and fear and freedom.

i think word is a nonhuman thing it is fucking me softly it is hurting me sexy it is love

i think it is divine. that is lovely and scary and in writing i love fear. in life i am afraid of fear but in writing i love it.

the word-fuck is sometimes a translation, like i discover this translation of a word and excitement is making me an egg and making me a child-creature inside this egg that is breaking the shell, like i am breaking away from myself becoming something something. the findings of the inbetweens of translation is breaking the egg, it is the world.

the word-fuck is sometimes a memory-poem i cannot stop writing, is sometimes a rhythm is following the lead of word that are experts of pleasure.

Word is passion in passive because i don’t need to do because words do this to me, i just follow and this means total multiple agency.

Words are sex when impossible.

poem is sex when reading while laying down on the floor (the floor is my favourite level from under the surface of human i see wonders of dirt and detail) and i touch my body as a word as world touch a world as a body the word is a body in me and next to me total excitement –

but i also feel fear of Words. fear for Words.

i use Words.

it makes me afraid.

but it is a fear that also comforts me.

learning to know a Word is endless, is nuance of danger and kindness, is constant trying to understand and un-understand.

Words tell me all humans are connected because they are more than human.

Words are parasites and fungus and fetus and scraps and traces and shells and corals and floods are streams and stones and ghosts and heaven

Words are pleasure without making sense

Words are a sense and sensory beings.

Words make me feel stupid in the most pleasurable way.

Words are bodies they are physical i don’t understand how there could be a difference

loving Words are easy and difficult and in the moment of writing and reading this doubleness is an orgasm of ambivalence like a softness of masochism and sadism and a blush of the real

Words are rivers and roars they are madness more real than reality

Words are heavenly madness, are cute muddy devils.

when writing i can write about so cruel things and it feels like love and

Be. Longing.

the being as a not-yet as a longing for something unnamed and untold

Word is trying to be a Word -

is frustration is exhausted a ghost euphoria.

when reading and writing. i am not i -

i am everything nothing

blush i think is Girl river is trying to connect fox is becoming.

and they are all mixed and moving.

i like Girl a lot.

i am Girl i am not Girl i am more than less than Other than Girl.

Girl is nothing is everything .

Girl i a word -

that cannot be grasped

but cannot stop trying -

Word is trying the impossible.