trach manuscript 4-15-2025 b

Trach

Poetry that is More than the Sum

of its Parts

A genre-fluid visual poetry

illness narrative

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Contents

1.Introduction…5

History of Trach … 7

“This is not an illness narrative.” … 8

2. Making Friends with the Angel of Death … 11

White Shadows in the Dark … 14

3. Writing as Recovery … 20

Starting from Scratch and Finding a Voice … 21

Re-Defining Health/ Re-Defining Poetry … 24

Experimenting with Doodles … 28

4.Re-vision, Re-mixing, Collage: Poetry as Research … 30

Genre-Fluid Visual Poetry as Unfinishable… 31

What does it take? (visual poetry)… 32

God Would Know: Visual Poem Explosion… 37

After “Making Friends with the Angel of Death”… 41

5.Trach: Messy Poetry and Messy Research … 46

Trach: Thinking in Shapes, Thinking in Metaphor … 52

Trach Pt. I (Introduction) … 53

Trach Pt. I … 56

Genre-Fluid Visual Poetry as Methodology … 77

The Power of Creative Research … 78

6.Analogy: A Universal Language … 81

Analog_ … 83

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Analogy as Shape? … 94

7. A Place of Abundance … 98

Write Sheer Ordinariness: Don’t Self-censor (and Don’t

Narrow your Scope) … 99

Paradox (the Only truly Renewable Resource) … 100

Paradox: From Language to Logical Incompleteness … 102

ACT II: Tara Lives! … 104

8. Epilogue … 114

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1.Introduction

In simple phrasing, "Trach", pronounced “trash” is a genre-fluid illness

narrative told primarily through visual poetry. It is a semiautobiographical

account of my experiences as a 21st century graduate

student with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, bulimia nervosa, and epilepsy.

Despite this being “visual poetry”-based, I did not seek to illustrate

every aspect of what I have gone through. Quite frankly, I could not tell

my whole story because nothing about illness, or this moment in history,

really fits into a neat narrative, or at least, it shouldn’t: the complexity of

the human psyche and the human body are most important to draw

attention to, no less because talking about these issues can lead me to

reify stereotypes or draw from common misperceptions without

considering how all bodies relate to my story.

It was more important to me to use this medium to explore what cannot

usually be explored in an illness narrative, or even academic research.

Plenty of meditative mini-essays are in this illness narrative mess, though

I would prefer to find other avenues of sharing these thoughts. But it is

genuine that I created this illness narrative as a way to ask impossible

questions, particularly those that arose while I was recovering from

schizophrenia.

The timeline of this project spans from 2013, the year I graduated high

school and the year I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, into now, 2025.

These years that comprise my young adulthood are also marked by many

moments of political and social trauma: the Black Lives Matter

movement of 2013, political upheaval of 2016, the rise and

weaponization of conspiracy theories, the pandemic of 2020 in my first

semester of graduate school, then the recent anti-DEI legislation that

threatens to put out the last embers of academic freedom. Though this

narrative is about me, the strange turns this work has taken, as well as

my academic path are also a result of this shared trauma.

At every step of the way while writing this, I would like to nearly

robotically understand my reader’s perspective. As a matter of fact, I

want to get inside the heads of my readers and see what they see, or

become them in some way – that has always been a motivation for me.

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History of Trach

At risk of limiting your interpretations of this collection, I will inform You

outright that I didn’t start writing this illness narrative for typical reasons:

back in Spring 2019, I created the first version of an illness narrative, calling it

“This is My Thing”. It was a highly tangential, nearly unreadable document

with multiple fonts, white type on black or red backgrounds. It also contained

photos of hand-written poems, things I created while investigating truth and

trying to find a healthy mental state.

Besides having to deal with these issues, the pandemic era also made me more

likely to relapse with issues, such as binge-eating, and purging. My epilepsy

that had subsided for years returned during graduate school – I presently

expect at least two break out seizures a semester. But to me, all of these

issues were merely a backdrop.

In 2020, I was urged to allow my mental health conditions to form the

narrative, or the substantive tissue for my creative thesis. From this feedback,

I began my work on developing a so-called “illness narrative”. I am, and

always have been, rightfully skeptical of the genre because I didn’t want to

limit or universalize the experiences of these conditions—schizophrenia,

bulimia, and epilepsy—when doing so might re-create internal biases, or

agendas that I hold with regard to my experiences. So let it be known that this

is just one experience of one person with these conditions.

__

My skepticism of the genre, paired with my desire to pursue research

questions that began during my recovery journey, led me to innovate this

genre. This collection has purposes that go far beyond simple documentation.

Trach is also an endeavor to make manifest an alternative epistemic reality. I

wanted to bring readers into my world so that they could intimately

understand what it feels like to be schizophrenic, epileptic, and bulimic.

Throughout this chapbook, I attempt to allow readers to take their space and

be inside their body. This means allowing for there to be confusion,

unhappiness, tiredness, and questions. I have brought up multiple times to

professors in my English degree that there is not nearly enough time spent

staring into the void. That is why my real project is to make space by

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validating the refuse—let truth be what it wills itself to be, and let it be “ugly”

while at the same time, being valued for its insight.

Another antecedent of Trach and its design is my incapacity to “make sense”,

to make “good art”, or to make “pretty art” because of genuine intellectual

issues I encountered after entering graduate school. I am also drawing from

critiques on Western aesthetic values. This will show up in poor choices of

words, byzantine phrases, internal contradictions, cliches, typos, unreadable

notes, and other screams into the void.

The thought puddles I have encountered with my research style are large

enough to drown me and that’s what makes this work innovative—it requires

new objectives and parameters for success. For all that I share here, let it be

known that all want is for literary meaning to be brought back to the body, so

that this Trach illness narrative can be read in a holistic way. If I can achieve

this with Trach, then I am one step closer to creating an accessible, genrefluid

type of scholarship that is based on complex—dispersed, networked,

and embodied—narrative features.

I did not learn how to write Trach or this illness narrative in a course. I had to

create my own methodology and process. In this way, the creation of this

illness narrative was, in its own, a healing act and an empowering artform.

“This is not an illness narrative”

Central to the context of this illness narrative too are the ways in which this is

not really an illness narrative. The randomness of illness is an issue to me

too—like how and why should I include all of these conditions in the same

illness narrative? Should I not write two or three?

I still encounter memories long forgotten about the odd experiences I have

had, such as the one afternoon when I was convinced that powerlines, located

in my grandmother’s backyard, caused cancer through their electromagnetic

radiation 1 . This caused me such immediate terror that I searched for

1

This is a conspiracy narrative that has been going on for decades. It started

with studies that found a correlation between powerline proximity to

childhood illnesses, cancer, and a disruption in melatonin production. Jobsrelated

EMR exposure has also been linked to illnesses like cancer.

Meanwhile, people that live nearer to powerlines, and those that have high-

EMR exposure at work (industrial laborers, electricians, telecommunications

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emergency solutions—clothing, materials, tin-foil hats, and armor that could

protect me and my family from EMR. (Sadly, I found multiple, possibly

predatory, websites that sold this type of wear, despite “EMR” protective

equipment not existing, according to scientific consensus.)

Luckily, my overwhelming paranoia subsided in a matter of hours after I had a

conversation with my family and realized that my panic was unnatural and

that EMR-exposure risks are not substantiated by concrete, irrefutable

evidence. If this seems like a strangely sharp turn of events, I promise you that

I agree; the life of a schizophrenic, or any ill person, is full of unexplainable

changes, anti-climaxes, and turns that really don’t make much narrative

sense. Adding to the strangeness is the fact that I was never a paranoid

schizophrenic—I primarily suffered from hallucinations and delusions related

to religion, and these hallucinations and delusions were all inter-connected,

enveloping, sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutal, like a personal

mythology.

If I wanted to tell a “good story” about my illnesses, I would focus on those

experiences and probably leave out the one afternoon that I was terrified of

powerlines. Also, I might leave out the other conditions I have had—epilepsy

and bulimia nervosa—because it is very challenging from a story-telling

standpoint to include these. Yet, these illnesses all form me and they were all

a part of my existence as a young adult. Also, not many people know that

schizophrenia, eating disorders, and epilepsy are all comorbid 2 to varying

degrees.

Another reason why this is not a typical narrative is that I knew simply telling

You about what I have gone through would not bring You to a space of

elevated awareness. This is not good because the purpose of this illness

narrative is, in the end, to assist readers in coalescing their perspectives with

that of mine as an ill-minded person. But embedded in the purpose is the

truth that my perspective itself is not “ill”, nor are my illnesses the true

subject of Trach.

field workers) are also lower-income people with more stress and less

healthcare. Therefore, the correlation can likely be explained by income

levels. But that doesn’t stop either Neil Lawrence of Midwest Today (1996,

https://efis.psc.mo.gov/Document/Display/240356) or Carles et al. in

Elsevier’s Environmental Research (2020,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2020.109473) from covering this topic.

2

Read Yum et al. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2009.09.004) and Rodríguez et

al. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9289381/)

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But embedded in this purpose is the truth that my perspective itself is not “ill”

to me, nor are my illnesses the true subject of Trach. In fact, what I really

wanted to do with this illness narrative was make use of research I started

while recovering from schizophrenia, bulimia nervosa, and epilepsy. Thusly,

this Trach collection relies heavily on notes and dialogues that I created as a

method of recovery.

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2.Making Friends with

the Angel of Death

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I have had to question multiple times whether or not I am “fixed”, or if there

are still parts of me and my thinking—or my Trach project—that have been

led astray, or that have no place in healthy, balanced conversation. Years into

this project, I am aware now that this question really doesn’t matter and that

all of us are delusional in our own ways. And by “delusional”, I mean that we

live in a world of worlds where we have choices to make and beliefs that we

protect. What matters is how strongly you connect with and understand your

heuristic for making those decisions.

_

This concept chapter, “Making Friends with the Angel of Death”, is all

about binary-ness (“this” or “that” choices), making friends with it and finding

ways to un-nest yourself in a world that bequests meaning through division.

Binaries are actually paradox incarnate: they pose restrictions on meanings

and cause us to wonder for endless years what the “correct” answer or action

is for deeply ambiguous questions. For example, “what is my purpose?”, or

“am I a worthwhile person?”, “am I a worthwhile artist?”, “am I a good

person?”, or “am I a good artist?”.

Without ‘division’, there are no decisions, there is no ability to question, and

there are no names for things—there is no capacity to tell a doctor that you

are ill and need medication, nor is there a way to say that you are no longer

ill.

For me, I wish not to certify one single point in which I became not ill. You

and I know very well that the human body, and especially mental health

conditions, do not follow that logical binary. You might wonder then why I

have chosen to write an “illness narrative”. The reason why is because my

relationship to “illness” has been unwound through many years of selfsearching.

Healing is said to happen after following a set of procedures or

ingesting a chemical, or being told by someone with a degree that you are

bequeathed “not ill”. This is especially tricky when you are schizophrenic,

because cultural perceptions of this condition are what determine the

outcomes of it. For instance, if a schizophrenic person suddenly stops

engaging in loud arguments as a result of their delusional beliefs that there is

an alien inside them,… that person is so-called ‘healed’ whenever they stop

talking.

_

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With this, practitioners have said about me that I was ‘getting better’ or

healed when I was given harsh medications—such as Risperdone, Latuda, or

Invega, that made it impossible for me to engage in obsessive or loud

behaviors. Many of my poems speak to the experience of being failed or

othered by western medicine.

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White shadows in the dark

Fall 2013-Spring 2015

I created multiple handwritten and visual poems documenting the

reality of multiple diagnoses. In this concept collection, “white

shadows in the dark”, handwritten poems document schizophrenic

experiences. I actually first started writing handwritten poems while

recovering from schizophrenia medications—the medications themself

left were what emptied me and physiologically destroyed me so that I

had no energy to sit at a computer and type. Yet, my thoughts were so

tangled that I needed to release them.

Pen and paper helped me manifest something oddly permant and

physical, yet also quick and raw. This was the kinetic type of expression

I needed back then. Thus, I have dozens of note-books with cogitations

about meanings, truths, and contradictions. Though I currently plan,

draft, and graphic design many visual poems, these handwritten poems

are unedited and are authentically written when I was ailed by

hallucinations and delusions. These handwritten notes and poems are a

stepping stone for the later visual poetry work I have done, including

presentation poetry, performance poetry, and collage poetry.

With “White shadows in the dark”, there is an unfinishment and

brutality to what shows up on the page. The effect on the speaker is a

bridging of the gap between chaotic magnanimity and childlike

ineptitude. Conceptually, the poems are dark and often unscrutable, so

as to capture the threat of the unknown or the unconscious for one

whose fears can be materialized, seemingly, into the world before

them. For someone with schizophrenia like myself, the only anodyne to

suffering is a conscious decision to import ones fears into the conscious

forefront of ones mind. It is only then that ambiguity can be wrestled

with.

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3.Writing as Recovery

Writing visual poems while recovering from schizophrenia and the loss

of a voice (through being ignored by healthcare professionals) felt

similar to frantically trying to find a pen to write down a phone

number, a name, or an important piece of information that I would

need later. These handwritten things were a necessary tool that I used

to elaborate on sensory experiences while also building connective

tissue for my epistemic world, so that I could see the cracks in an

imposed or trained reality. This seems like a very methodical process,

but truthfully, it was a brute force means for me to stay sane and take

one step forward, at least, every day.

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Starting from Scratch and

Finding a Voice

My notes then helped me re-trace my steps and find my way back to

peace. In 2017, I shared several of these poems at a Denny’s workshop

with professional writers, including Tom Murphy, Alan Berecka,

Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton, and Stefan Sencerz. The reason why I

thought to share them was because I was marred by a bad case of

writer’s block and the handwritten poems and very messy notes were

all I had to share. I figured that I might be able to type and edit these

poems into worthwhile pieces to read in several months time, when I

was fully recovered.

To my surprise, everyone that read my handwritten poems told me

that they were interesting pieces. The impact of the handwriting and its

texture brought forth more meaning than typed writing could and the

pieces essentially didn’t need editing. Hamilton, a scholar of translation

and a decorated poet, told me that the work could be considered visual

poetry. Murphy, as well, shared information about the San Antonio

writer, Octavio Quintanilla, who was creating visual poems that mixed

painting with text.

In my newness to my writing seriously, I had never heard of “visual poetry”,

but I have considered myself to be a visual poet, rather than just a poet, ever

since then. By now, I think that visual poetry may be the best medium above

either prose or visual art, to write my illness narrative because it is so

unbounded. The shortcomings of language, the inability to capture

transpicuous emotion or ideas through simple vocabulary, leave a place for

poetry’s need.

_

Still, I must share that the current epistemic practice I use—Trach visual

poetry—took me years to make sense of and bring forth into this illness

narrative. In another sense, this illness narrative required me to gain a sense of

control over my epistemic world. This is what makes this project, Trach, a

healing project above all.

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Re-Defining Health/

Re-Defining Poetry

When given medication, I could no longer obsessively pray until my knees

bled. I was also forced to sleep, while before, I had stopped sleeping, instead

choosing to pray all night long, sometimes collapsing from exhaustion and

waking up on the floor. I had also stopped eating, which was the real reason

why I was hospitalized during my first psychotic episode when I was 18 years

old.

Though the medications effectively decreased hallucinations, side effects such

as compulsive eating led me to develop binge-eating disorder and obesity. The

drug Risperdone made me eat compulsively, as though my appetite was an

itch I could not scratch—this was uncomfortable and disgusting to me, and

my 18-year-old self communicated this to a psychiatrist. Their only response

was that this increase in my appetite was a good thing given that I had stopped

eating in the months before and was underweight.

This medication led me to go from 89 pounds to 160 pounds in 6 months. I

was actually underweight in 2013 because I had stopped eating as part of the

schizophrenia, but then Risperdal, heavy exhaustion, stress, and unbearable

neurological side effects led me to gain 80 pounds from Fall 2013 to Spring

2014. Trying to control my eating and weight after going through this led me

to develop an eating disorder. I wiould describe binge-eating bulimia as

physical addictions and I was unable to eat normally for many long durations,

perhaps months at a time.If any psychiatrist had cared about my real

experiences and concerns, perhaps I never would have struggled with bingeeating

or bulimia for years.

My psychiatrist was a very good person and a good psychiatrist—when my

medication turned out to cost hundreds of dollars per pill thanks to the US

pharmaceutical industry, my psychiatrist gave me free samples of the drug.

There is probably some regulation or rule against this, but he cared more

about me getting better than me buying the medication, which my family

could not do. Western medicine is a useful science that does a lot of good, but

it is not perfect. The fundamental model of psychiatry caused me to become a

subject, alienated to my own body and its needs.

I wish I had known sooner that medications are just drugs, chemicals that

produce some impact – blunt force sometimes. I always felt like these drugs

were just throwing a wrench into a machine that was working just fine,

though it was producing things (hallucinations, delusions) that made no sense

to outsiders – bad products, thoughts gone bad or haywire(?). I wish I had

known then that the complex data, the senses, the ways my body

talked to me, held the most useful information, and that ugliness of a

thought and a body are useful data too.

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Experimenting with Doodles

Another aspect of this healing through writing visual poetry had to do with

being able to fuse words and imagery, therefore creating visual poems that

break through modalities. This also allowed me to develop a more fluid

creative voice.

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4.Re-vision,

Re-mixing,

Collage:

Poetry as Research

During this time, I also experimented with one-line poems. But at the time,

these were just lines that stuck with me – I felt incapable and bad about not

being able to add more to these one-line poems (I didn’t call them “one-line”

poems either – to me they were just scraps).

The reason why this is meaningful to me is because presently, I still break into

the handwritten poems that I wrote during this time-period. Lines such as, “I

know that the rain is not for me, but thank you” show up in a section

below (“Analog_”) for the reason that I am still contemplating what these

words mean.

What I believe now is that poetry can contain wisdom that goes beyond the

speaker. You might even say that poetry can contain the essence of truth,

even more than a regular piece of writing or documentation can. This is

because you see more emotional and human dimensions – the data of a body.

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Additionally, these past poems are a beginning of my practice which is based

on collage and genre-fluid meaning creation.

Genre-Fluid Visual Poetry (as

Unfinishable)

As a method of recovery, poetry, re-vision, and re-vising are what made my

work “trachy” sometimes—it is a smattering of old and new. But more than

this, it is a departure from expectations of either poetry or an “illness

narrative”. It is a willingness to allow a poem to be unfinished also. Because

when your poems or writing are unfinished, then this signifies that you have

the ability to return to those works, change them, and give them the opposite

meaning if you so chose.

With unfinishment, I am also closer to a reader because I have to make

choices where I wouldn’t otherwise make choices: the poems are not

“complete”, they are made for the audience – they are adaptations or

translations. The only way to bring these poems into this illness narrative is to

have a purpose. Connecting my illness narrative and genre-fluidity to purpose

is what makes my poetry explorative and research-oriented.

_

With many of my earlier works, I have since “broken into” and remixed them,

For the samplings below, some poems are both typed and with hand-written

elements or graffiti. While these are somewhat more cleanly written, they are

still visual poems, exploration, and experimental.

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what does it take (visual poem)

What does it take

to get to that place

and still know

the real you?

tapered, skimped peeling off

from the teeth guts falling out guts falling

out why wont you die ?

the first

memoriesinnocencesin

obscurefutile efforts of becoming,

becoming becoming what? at war with

the nothingness, insensible sensibility

incapability of expressing

what thou whilst.

she didn't know what to say

just be careful where you step

not today not today.

remember i was young

and we used to watch rated r movies

together like what all the world said

about profanity, parenting meant

nothing, mother

when a sex scene came on, mother

you would tell us to look away,

older sister and me only 9 or 10.

we would giggle and think little of it

the moaning the gasping the feverish

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way you would want us to fail to see

pixels on a screen in oscillating colors

red blue green

colors i once knew

that i now know are struck

into a brain electronically

imaginationorgans sensory pressures,

body saying what things are

before you do

eyes turn over, there are always

mistakes

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where people love you

Here's this trouble, she always thought too much of me. i am a

bug-utterchaos entrails with no anatomy

that’s ever been known

the worse animals are immortal seeming just wont die

i was 21 years old when i told my mother that i was dating, the

first human being i had ever dated, someone without gender, but

black white black and white black white black white black white or

another ‘comprehensible’ ‘color’. the selfishness,

what i did

the selfishness

e very thing

no. i was dating what parents would call a woman. shield your

eyes

a girl-thing that knew themself better than themself. i don’t blame

you for your anger

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“God Would Know”:

Visual Poem Explosion

Spring 2022

Because of the providences of visual poetry—the use of visual modalities—

some of my later works were exploded: highly visual, layered works with

both handwritten and typed components. The reason why I call this

“exploded” is because my re-visions were meant to bring in more meaning,

hidden corners, and feelings that weren’t placed in the typed version of the

poem.

The poem/s “God Would Know” began as a more traditional poem. After

typing it up, I felt like there was much more to say than I could fit into the

black and white type, so I printed out the poem and wrote more, crossing out

lines, and using a distinctly stronger voice than I used to write the original

poem.

Following from this, I have considered “explosion” to be an important motif

in the way that narrative explosion is necessary to tune into when your story

is so complex that it cannot fit into a clean narrative. It is my perception that

all people are infinitely complex, so their stories are likely too complex to

finish. Therefore, narrative explosion as a writing and thinking tool is useful

and validating to me while creating this illness narrative.

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After “Making Friends

with the Angel of Death”

A re-vised concept (2024-2025)

The concept “Making Friends with the Angel of Death” is something I

have been meditating on and drawing inspiration from. Many of my pieces I

currently write are still working with the idea of binary-ness and what

trappings is has, as well as what it provides—boundaries, a means to create

discourses (through division).

The motifs of quanta and metaphysical questions still run through my poems.

This is not emblematic of my poetry so much as it is my purpose for writing

poetry. This is a re-vised concept: a reflection on the depth of “Making

Friends with the Angel of Death”. These reflections came later, after writing

and thinking about the same concept. Elucidating and allowing concepts to

grow is an important part of the concept engineered and concept design

quality of this illness narrative.

_

Secretly, “Making Friends with the Angel of Death” is named after

someone who I was friends with briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic of

2020. They were named after the angel of death, which I found to be ironic

given that they were incapable of understanding ambiguity, similar to the

biblical angel of death: There were only bloody X’s on doors or the absence of

them for the angel of death to work with – I assume that there were no

ambiguous cases of half-X’s, or Xs not written in the blood of a calf.

It makes sense too, theologically, that an angel would be incapable of such

reasoning because according to Christian dogma, angels are actually not

necessarily human-like, and angels are generally not capable of reasoning like

a complex human mind—in a positive light, this means that humans are

actually more highly regarded by a Christian God because of the tremendous

good that they are capable of creating through reason—really, through

reasoning through ambiguity.

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On a negative light, this also means that unlike angels, humans can do

whatever they want with their reasoning, which is not necessarily good. We

can spend our entire lives entranced by quandaries, or made anxious by

quandaries—when will I die? Does this person like me? Am I going to lose my job

tomorrow and not be able to feed myself and my family?

This, again, is the duality of binaryness—the ways that it can be used to

adjudicate unruly contemplation,… and we can tell ourselves “this is a

useless, negative thought”, or “I am just being paranoid.”

The truth of the matter is that there is no truth to this matter. But there is

chaos whose theory states that there are consequences to even small actions. If

that causes you to suffer, than you can re-think your actions next time

and make improvements. And remember that you won’t capture truth,

you will just have decisions to make that lead to other decisions, and actions

that lead to consequences.

And you can consider it the truth that all of modern science and modern

inquiry are really just an attempt to help with this: take prolonged, detailed

notes about actions and their consequences; put these into a comprehensible

whole that we call science and continue adding finer and finer details. In

another version of the 21 st century, we are all aware that our primary goals

(with science and inquiry) is to avoid pain, control outcomes, and perhaps

many other related goals. Clearly we are not angels.

Bearing Witness to Non-Western Proofs

I was contemplating this metaphor when I wrote this Re-vision because the

real life Angel (a stand-in name) who I used to be friends with would

constantly argue with me about politics and Christianity. Angel happened to

be an extremist with a disproportional reliance on extremist ideology to

define Christianity. So Angel’s version of Christianity melded into

(supposedly biblically-supported) white nationalist beliefs and prejudices

against women, racial minorities, queerness, “social correctness”, or even

mental health counseling.

I tried to have conversations with Angel about theological questions, but

every time I brought up big questions, Angel would make the conversation

into a childish debate in which the only goal was to talk louder, or talk over,

the other person, without actually considering the other’s perspective. In

short, I was talking to an insensibly combative far-right extremist whose veins

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literally popped out of their head while they regurgitated sound bites stolen

off of extremist podcasts 3 .

When I told them about my beliefs that differed from theirs, they would

scream at me and demand that I “prove it”, that is, prove with immediacy, in a

short turn of phrase, the very complicated position I held.

The ”prove it” mentality is what I really need to talk about—because the

concept of “proof” can be so different to so many, but technically,

mathematical proofs are considered to be the most sound. Thus, all of

research might have an inexplicable relationship to mathematics through

logical positivism. Though empiricism and positivism are most associated with

science, a drive towards elaborating, explaining or encountering Truth itself is

everywhere in research. At the same time, researchers differ in their use or

non-use of Truth in their perception of their work, I argue that Truth is

conceptually extant in all research systems and orientations. By this, Truth

itself as a concept is not analogous to “truth” logically, but it is analogous or

similar to a Universe of all universes 4 : That is, the Universe broadly

speaking, not just narrowing speaking – the everything, all of it, not just parts

of the “universe”, or one being’s perception of the “universe”.

Truth: A Collaboration

If you are following me, then you might reason that working within a

conceptual Universe or Whole is actually ideal. Without a Universe of

universes, no research would hold any meaning or use because the reaped

“results” or “theories” would be so imposing and fragmented to any viewers,

that the resolving of global problems would not be possible.

So, a Universe of universes is what a researcher fundamentally bases their

activities, research questions, collaboration, and profession on. Therefore, no

matter the type of research, it is a collaboration with Truth itself. But you

should understand that “Truth itself” is a concept not a thing to be directly

touched, except through analogy. The reason why I say this is because

“theories” and Western imperialism are much more inter-connected than is

3

For instance, Angel would state that the white race is smarter, and thus the better

and more American race, because of IQ studies state such as thing. This is an example

of how the data revolution has been overtly grabbed and perverted by extremists and

conspiratorial writers. This makes extremist views ideologies all the more pervasive

and rhetorically impactful to an untrained eye.

4

This is common phrasing in philosophy, and Universe with a capital letter is

shorthand for “Universe of universes”.

43

apparent— The languages of the research that has come before us have caused

tremors in the form of epistemes, methodologies, information structures,

norms, and limitations in research. Words themselves have histories and

systems in which certain privileges are allowed to users, while non-users are

not permitted those privileges. Researchers with words and literacies for

them are those that are considered “great”.

Truth: Obsolescing Influences of Dominating

Epistemes

Angel of Death aside, both Western thought and Western religion run

through US academic work, which is hierarchically at the top of the world’s

knowledge-management. This is the result of rivulets of influence that began

in the time of Socrates, taken up by the Vatican, and then perpetuated

through reifying discussions and orientations of thoughts throughout

centuries.

Adding to these “reifying discussions” were predominantly thinkers that had

privilege, which equated to time and respect, which thus, leads to patriarchy

and colonization being the holders of power and discussion leaders. I want to

earmark this by saying that I love Western thought—I read many texts by

Aristotle, that were actually written by Aristotle’s students; I read the

Odyssey and Shakespeare in high school and experienced literature written by

dead white people having new life; I still appreciate and respect the time

taken by philosophers and theorists like Derrida. Mallarme, Anaxagoras,

Plato, Russel, Wittgenstein, and even Freud. Because thinking takes time and

work, and putting thinking into a graspable form takes even more work.

Yet, my conviction as a researcher has always been not to draw attention to

the thinkers that have clout, but to think between what is known and was is

not yet known. And also, I want to consider the people and thinking that

haven’t been honored or given space yet.

Most importantly, I want to find ways to bring attention to these things

without imposing another dominating narrative that is taken to be absolutely

truthful and concretely paradigmatic. Only poetry can complete this job.

44

45

46

5.Trach: Messy Poetry

and Messy Research

The hidden story (2020-present)

The starting place for Trach is very humble: its earliest version is contained in

the notes and handwritten poems I created while recovering from my

conditions. What is more difficult to share are my real writing and research

goals with this illness narrative. This is because, true to my writing as

recovery practice, my intention is also to validate my less “poetic” notes as a

research tool. The reason why is because I wanted to take my research

process back to my body and also back to the chaos-driven world. This

contrasts with an academic perspective that relies on disciplinary and

convention-based boundaries in order to organize and validate knowledge.

My journey shared, through this genre-fluid illness narrative relying on

authentic notes, is meant to demonstrate how healing can take place through

epistemic representation. For example, pieces throughout this collection

make use of notes about universal truths, all using mixed or interdisciplinary

concepts and languages. Some notes are more coherent to an outside audience

than others. Importantly, I used these notes to trace patterns or shapes of

concepts and truths. I especially learned to rely on note-taking because I had

been misled by hallucinations and delusions. Down the line, when I entered a

graduate English program in 2020, I would also create extensive digital notes,

screencaps, and mixed-genre notes on several platforms. My desire was to

manifest as much of my thinking as possible, and the result is that I have many

gigabytes of unsifted through notes to base this work on.

In this, there are many notes and fragments that I have studied, and am still

studying, in order to map out my personal epistemic world. My aim is to use

my recovery notes/ visual poems to illustrate a new method of problemsolving

through genre-fluid visual poetry. This Trach methodology is a decolonizing

methodology in that it works against predispositions to knowledge

organization and epistemic privilege.

In this concept chapter, I share some original notes and a few pieces that use

this methodology.

47

48

49

50

51

Trach: Thinking in Shapes,

Thinking in Metaphor

I share more about the purpose of my notes in “White shadows in the

dark”. But let it be known that the large archive of notes I have are abundant,

sometimes redundant, but still extremely enlightening with regard to my

larger research goals. But also, adding a few cold notes was obligatory given

how much these were, indeed, a part of my illness narrative, and also my

recovery journey.

This is true despite how wild, messy, and organic my research process was.

For instance, because my original interests were simply in articulating my

thinking and ascertaining truth so that I could remove myself from the traps of

harmful delusions. As I continued this practice, throughout the years, my

notes became more wholistic and I felt the need to seek out more outside

information in order to make sense of “shapes” of truth. I use this term

“shape” to refer to the coagulations of truth systems, things that can be

apprehended to suggest truths, but aren’t necessarily absolutely truthful. But

shapes 5 can also be understood as another word for “analogy”.

However, shapes are most useful when thought of as more solid,

sophisticated, dynamic, and studyable than “theories”. I have become less

interested in the term “theory” to describe anything because theories are very

couched in privileged Western epistemologies. Therefore, I use shapes to talk

about the shape of theories in a post-truth situation and the ethical ways that

these shapes can be used. Additionally, the term “shape”, as well as its

nearness to mathematical thinking, implies that there is a meta-language

available to use for studying phenomenon that are usually studied via theories.

I have also become interested in complexity theory and its shapes as a research

meta-language.

None of the meta-research moves I make are particularly unique. And I know

that I, like many writers, weave a tangled web when my creative work of

Trach ought to bring the heft of meaning moreso than a hefty introduction.

5

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician, wrote an entire book about shapes in nature—

“Shape” (2021) in which he describes the “hidden geometry” to phenomena like

Democracy or evolution.

52

But I have to share that this Trach genre-fluid visual poetry illness narrative

has used decolonizing methods of writing and research, all of which make it

fundamentally interesting, and also sometimes “bad”. I will not hide the ways

that this Trach is sometimes just “bad art” or “bad poetry”. But also, I will

suggest to you that “badness” is not an absolute quality, it is a cultural

evaluation—this is not a new take1F 6 . The badness of my writing and

research style are part of the reason why this work is called Trach.

Additionally, my attempts at de-colonizing my writing and research methods

have led me to intellectual isolation and academic failures. So, the badness has

consequences, which is why this illness narrative is also a failure narrative.

Trach Pt. I

Trach Pt. I is a playscript written to narrate the experience of scholarly

isolation and failure.

When I entered a graduate program in Spring 2019, my background of

learning and researching on my own was ever-present in my academic

writing. This showed itself in inadvertent messiness, translanguaging, and

fragmentation. With my lack of experience in graduate writing, I could not

express that my writing style was the result of my personal methodology and

research goals. Even early on in my graduate career however, I knew that I

wanted to use genre-fluid visual poetry to explore topics, feelings, and

experiences that were not expressible in academic literature. As a student, I

would tell my professors or anyone that would listen that everything I wrote,

including academic papers, were visual poetry to me: regardless of design

constraints, everything I created was through a visual poetry lens and practice.

This was not problematic. In fact, as a visual poet, I had an innate

understanding of how rhetorical visual elements and words can be.

It wasn’t until I got two semesters into the program that I realized how much

information was being lost or mis-translated because of constraining academic

assignments, discourses, expectations, timelines, and environments. In truth, I

decided at that point that I would have to respond differently and unexpectedly,

sometimes badly, to course assignments. I also knew that in order to make

genre-fluid visual poetry into a scholarly genre, a lot of groundwork,

6

I actually decided to study English in 2020 after getting a Chemistry degree because

I wanted to develop a new type of editorial publishing that did not de-humanize its

participants, and that did not support colonized perceptions of “good writing”. This is

still a major project of mine and colleagues with Windward Review creative journal—

compassionate and humanistic editing.

53

preparation and experimentation would have to be done. This led me to

respond to some course assignments using my own (ugly) methods instead of

following guidelines and expectations closely.

I would receive low grades and sometimes fail to submit assignments,

particularly because the assignments were to complex to respond to with

visual poetry—the result would be that I had enough time to plan a response,

but absolutely no framework or means to tell my professors that I would be

doing my work differently. At one point in 2023, in a materialist literature

course, I was tasked with writing an essay about a play using a materialist lens.

Instead of writing this essay, I found myself embodying my observations and I

created my very own playscript. This playscript ended up becoming “Trach

Pt. I”.

54

Background on Trach Pt. I

In my best and worst of times, I have experienced long, debilitating periods

where I could not intellectually make sense of academic assignments or

prescriptive writing projects such as a literature review. I call this literature

reviews “prescriptive” because they are made to capture disciplinary

knowledge and then synthesize it so as to assist that discipline in expanding

and continuing its deeply interdependent, ingrained disciplinary

conversations. Essentially, literature reviews sustain themselves as a dominant

mode of research sharing, which is supported by a capitalistic system that

knowledge workers are organized and regulated by.

The demands of a professional scholar, then, are not solely that they do

quality, valuable research; the modern scholar, if they want to avoid

repercussions of failure and a lack of funding, must be disciplined, and

therefore, must reproduce disciplinary insights and systems of power that are

contained in literature reviews. This is certainly a more pronounced problem

for a humanities scholar whose research credibility is in peril because they

choose to use de-colonizing methods or thinking. Additionally, there are

many very well-written literature reviews. But their reliance on journal

articles and books is so conventional and conspicuous that I have found it

impossible, or at least extremely inefficient, to do interdisciplinary research,

or to broaden the definition of “research” through a literature review.

Writing a literature review, for example, about broadening the definition of

“research” would be similar to writing a book about how to write a book by

systematically writing that book within the book. Essentially, you are binding

yourself to infinitely reproduce “book-ness” through representing it in fuller

and fuller, more precise fashion every time. The book would never be

finished because you would constantly be adding to the book, because it

contains the book that it is writing 7 .

Another drawback to a literature review is that they emphasize taking away

choices from the reader through super-imposed hierarchies of knowledge.

Though some might say that scholarship ought to be built from and through

disciplinary languages and methods, this perspective tends to rely on an

argument about the value of precision and volume apropos to connections

that can be made. However, my own research agenda and Trach have

broadened my view and have allowed me to perceive of the drawbacks of

“precise” writing and precise thinking for information sharing.

Particularly, precision can, paradoxically, make information less useful over

all. For example, thinking again about writing a book about how to write a

book, what if you decided to create a step-by-step, precise guide? For

example:

How to write a book:

Step1: Open a Word Document

Step 2: Type O

Step 3: Type n

Step 4: Type c

Step 5: Type e

Step 6: Press space

Step 7: Type u

Step 8: Type p

Step 9: Type o

Step 10: Type n

Step 11: Press space

Step 12: Type a

Step 13: Press space

Step 14: Type t

Step 15: Type i

Step 16: Type m

Step 17: Type e

…

7

This is a paradox related to Russel’s paradox.

55

In odd irony, precision and the desire to be perfectly clear in this guidebook

have left me missing the point of the very question at hand, which is the

question of how to write a book.

It is these types of pitfalls and quandaries that have made me look for

alternative discourses and also different ways to respond to essay assignments.

Additionally, a neurodivergent researcher that also suffers from health

conditions will find themselves having to work through these challenging

ethical issues while also trying to maintain sanity. I wrote Trach Pt. I, similar

to my handwritten poetry, as an authentic means to translate my reaction to

an assignment and share what it feels like to be a modern academic, trying to

overcome personal struggles and make space.

56

CAST LIST

ME:

confused MA student, ‘failure’, visual poet incapable of

finding success in an institutional setting; has been

called ‘diatribic’ in their writing style, but deep down,

they are soft-spoken and rightfully insecure about their

place in an academic community; finding it hard to be

hard-working and lazy at the appropriate times and

places in graduate school, also finding it impossible to

not be One or the Other in too much of a measure at any

given time; strengths=thinking; weaknesses=doing;

every now and then really wants to quit school

TARA INCOGNITA:

Trash artist (alterego of Me), trash theorist, trash

phenomenologist, trash writer, trash speaker; strengths

are blatant, unrelenting self-confidence to the point of

hypocrisy; argues that trash is literally everything

everywhere all the time--- it is all fundamentally,

eventually trash!; their rhetoric is similar to the very

careful folding up of a paper napkin, and then the

throwing it into a dumpster and setting the dumpster on

fire (literally),… and then the writing about it as though

it’s a special metaphorical experience,

[TARA is also an extension of ME created to

place ‘diatribic’ thoughts that move into

dangerous, marginalized spaces that are not

academic, not fair or purportedly

‘unopinionated’, not safe and typically avoided

Terra Incognita? Danger, monsters lurk]

YOU:

you

57

SETTING

Some TAMU-CC room, 5:40am-ish, Thursday 4-17-

2025. First off, you are TIRED and would like nothing

more than to get this thing overwith, - A thesis

defense is always a hit or a miss… at least it’s little

more than a formality. You are likely also in need of

caffiene hungry and/ or discomfited by other

material woes, such as having to use the bathroom,

or the immediate wonder of:

“””how long does this last? Is it rude if I leave

now…? I have papers due and I need to visit

the bank… I was supposed to meet someone

outside… it looks like they escaped…”””

***peers around surreptitiously***

[Your material wonder makes You all

the more appear like a relaxed

observer of this strange art. Rest

assured, there are many that feel just

like You. ]

META-SETTING

(This is the primary setting for the entire

play. And the setting of this play’s writing.)

58

my “bedroom” with ME sitting on “bed” (I have no

chair), unshowered for a couple days, smelly. This

is where I do all my work because I don’t have a

real desk. Actually, I have a desk but it’s used

entirely as a bookshelf, with books stacked on top

of it everywhere, also unopened packages of

books stacked next to the ‘bed’ ((mattress on

floor)). The door is blocked by a laundry

basket and a box of religious statues because the

youngest cat is in heat and won’t leave me aloneit

keeps on sitting on my chest and bopping me on

the nose, or making me sniff its butt as friendly

cats do- have to block the door bc it can’t close it

completely shut due to foundational resettling

decades earlier. I keep her out because she

gets in the way of my laptop, though she meows

and scratches at the small crevice of the door left

slightly open AND

[SOUND EFFECTS can and should be used]..

FOR STAGING:

My “room” is actually the laundry room at my

parents house. A ku-thunk ku-thunk kuthunk

that sometimes becomes faster (and

concerning sounding?) hammers through

the room from the washing machine

[it has 25 minutes left; the

SOUNDTRACK should be 25 minutes of

this inconsistently paced but loud

hammering sound; may become white

noise out of necessity].

My “bed” is actually a mattress on the floor

covered in papers and a few books; sheets

have cereal crumbs on them that can never

be entirely swept off –

59

actor of ME should periodically attempt to

or even grab a broom and clean the area

around the mattress, giving up halfway

when unable to find a dustbin-

[A a small pile of

CRAP/DUST/RUBBISH should be

located in the corner of the

bedroom/laundry room- it

should continue to grow

throughout the play as further

attempts are made to clean the

room and unsuccessful

attempts are made to find the

dustpan]

TECHNICAL TEXT NOTES

*asterisks mark action

Some dialogue is internal

[ ] brackets quite literally note things that

need to be added to the playscript AND/OR

action to be performed … OR, whatever

seems to fit naturally with that

asterisk…(***use your perennial judgement

60

ACT I: ‘“On time”’

SCENE 1

Dust-bin for the head

ME: **types furiously, no time to wonder how much of

this work will be useful, well-articulated, not sexist, not

imperialist, modernist but not imposing of historicity that

I know nothing of. Tunnel vision and weak editing

muscles set in because of weeks with very little sleep;

notes to self: will need to have a caffeine detox when

semester is over; **dry scoops 1/3 of a Walmart brand

pre-workout powder**

**on the laptop, we see what is being worked on… **

Zoe Elise Ramos Jmj

Dr. Pro Fessor

ENGL 5343

July 20, 2023

On Time (Graphic Complexity in Aaron Posner’s Chekov)

This paper has two titles: “On Time” and “Graphic

Complexity in Aaron Posner’s Chekov”. I chose the

title, ‘On Time’, several weeks ago because I

anticipated that I would be late turning in this paper,

and I thought it would be funny. But now that I’m a

week late turning in this paper, it seems like a

callous joke. It probably seemed like I dropped off

the face of the planet or something. I am ashamed

about that. This work is important to me but,

'One of the symptoms of an

approaching nervous breakdown

is the belief that one's work is

terribly important.' Bertrand

Russell

61

I also chose the title because I wanted to talk about

time and space. Physics is a big interest of mine

and I thought I’d approach a physics-backed

interpretation of materiality in my final paper,

given that “materialism” is such an unfinishable

construct. I don’t use the word ‘unfinishable’ in a

negative light. Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of

the incapacity of language to capture the totality of

something I seek to capture. [[[WOOLF STUFF

HERE- QUOTES?]]

ME (internal dialogue): as always, that’s a great title!!,…

but now I’m really off topic because this is not a paper

about physics, time or Woolf…; AND the tone is not

working, too honest…; but with quotes… maybe ill get

away with it; I’ll just put that in brackets now and grab

Woolf notes later, but now I need some goddamn

transition phrasing…

SCENE 2

Trashy transitions

62

I don’t use the word ‘unfinishable’ in a negative light.

Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of the incapacity of

language to capture the totality of something I seek to

capture. [[[WOOLF STUFF HERE- QUOTES?]]

ME (monologue format): I have a problem I am

a poet and no one listens to me. I have secrets to

share the universe, but no one cares. No one cares

that poetry is a living thing that bleeds out of me

and tells me more about myself and the universe

than I would ever learn alone. NOBODY CARES.

This is a long, boring essay and it doesn’t have the ornate

pictures or neat, compartmentalized thoughts that Kew

Gardens does. Nor does it have the finesse and

authenticity of a performed play. That is why I am

honest—because there is no other way to fill in lost

shades. Isn’t this what I am supposed to do here?? Be a

critical theorist that is so good at critique that they

critique themselves and the legitimacy of their profession

out of existence? Shouldn’t you, Pro Fessor, celebrate

my honesty?

ME (facing audience/ YOU): Wouldn’t it be nice

if I could write something like a children’s book instead

of a long, boring essay? Remember how easy it was to

connect with children’s books when you were kids???

It’s like, nothing gives you that anymore… … .. EXCEPT

for unfinished, nonsense, … MY NOTES that betray my

scholarly SANITY. trash

63

64

ME (monologue format, talking to

self): Well at least I’m writing

something, but unfortunately, trash

monologues cannot be a part of an

academic essay…. And I learned the

hard way that most professors don’t

like being reminded about how

colonialis their decolonialist

research practices are.

This style of writing will be

considered diatribic, too opinionated,

and suggestive of “inefficacy” and

“circularity” in standard academic

prose and theoretization,… … … even

though theory literally is circularity in

practice

. … these ideas do not fit in here,… but

perhaps they would fit in an

alternative universe?

ME (cont.): I used to be a poet

and find it easy to poetry(Verb),

explore and relate senses to

senses. But now, ive been trained

well to scrutinize my senses,

scrutinize my own scrutiny and

the scrutiny of others and the

65

senses of others. That’s what you

learn in graduate school, skills,

student learning outcomes.

I’ve been told that these

SLOs are written as deliberately

ambiguous. I appreciate this

because there’s space to adapt to

different perspectives of what is

essential to a graduate’s skillset/

outcomes. Really,

ADAPTATION is a skill everyone

should learn!!!

But ADAPTATION is not a ‘skill’ so

much as it is an anti-skill,… it’s

like, similar to Being okay with

living in a post-truth situation

and world, … having a million

places to be and things to do

66

at once,… …

ADAPTATION … is the art of Being

67

The real mystery is why and HOW some people

have convinced themselves that they don’t

poetry (verb)…

Like academics, politicians, scientists, and

probably Me and probably You have, at

various times, pretended that they knew

what they were doing.

The truth= we are all just making things up

as we go… what matters is what underlying

intention upholds that PRETENSE or

inhibition

68

But also, you are

screwed if you try

to be a lone world

here … there’s

freedom and captivity in

equal measure

69

SCENE 3:

Scooped

________________________________________________________________

70

Zoe Elise Ramos Jmj

Dr. Pro Fessor

ENGL 5343

July 20, 2023

On Time (Graphic Complexity in Aaron Posner’s

Chekov)

• A trilogy (with always the last part, the

best part missing, no conclusions)

This paper is in the form of a playscript. Because I’ve

always wanted the opportunity to give my essays a

soundtrack. And quite frankly, this is all I’ve got to

share.

I didn’t know how to write this materialist analysis

because my tools are complex, much more complex

than placing pixels and digits, and way more complex

than reading and reporting. I use research mostly as a

survival tool and I shamelessly talk about what I want

to talk about and work towards a wholistic theory.

This is a post-disciplinary paper meaning that I am

looking towards the future, thinking about the selfmutilation

that the commitment to academic parlance

requires, and wondering if there is an alternative path.

Autodidactic as I am, I will be honest about my

limitations: the time crunch, my inability to fully read

every text that I am literally analyzing,… the fact that

there are limitless ways in which I could have found

contrasts in the text that I am focusing on: Aaron

Posner’s Life Sucks; and too, I already had an

argument before I even started reading the literature.

BUT after perusing some literature, I realized that

what I wanted to say was way over-said. It is a

strange feeling when someone 40 years ago has the

same thoughts as you, the same thesis as you. It’s like

you’ve met your twin, but it’s only momentary. And

you wonder if what they were thinking is really

similar to you or if you are just talking to yourself

with everything you reading, slowing building up

your own egotistical thrusts, sensing of a feeling of

knowing 8 .

That’s called academic scooping—when you make an

independent discovery only to realize that someone

else wrote a paper about the same thing 30 years ago.

In fact, there is an entire field niche field of analysis

that does exactly what you are wanting to do: The

Journal of Mathematical Humanities. That’s a thing.

__________________________

ME: **sits back on bed and gets back to

typing furiously…; now this is not academic

enough; who is that one professor that

hates rhetorical questions??? What’s so

terrible about rhetorical questions?? Is it

because I’m supposed to pretend I have all

the answers?? Oh I’ll have to bracket that

too

ME (to audience): I just got back my grade in

discourse analysis. A ‘C’ with comments on my

final paper that can be summed up with the

phrase “scooped”. In their notes, I was told that

my lit review should have included two key

sources that relate complexity theory to

discourse analysis. I was critiqued for writing

about a paradigm shift in discourse analysis as

though this wasn’t already an acknowledged

change.

The simple truth, I labored over a 20 page paper,

moving from philosophy of language, complexity

8

A feeling of knowing is a neurological phenomenon

71

theory, and math sources, tying these

considerations into a disciplinary applied

linguistics thesis. Now I know (thanks to my

professor) that there are entire books written

about the exact hypothesis that I painstakingly

built up to via an interdisciplinary reservoir of

sources,.. and these books tell the story waaaaay

better than I ever could.

I was deducted points because i was LATE AS

ALWAYS and because any graduate student

doing a simple lit review should have found these

sources… shame on me. This is what makes me

bad at discipline. I should have found those

sources and geared my work differently, but I

had so little time. I knew it would be a terrible

paper, at best unfinished. But I didn’t know even

attempting to write it would be so futile. I didn’t

know that FUTILITY was an option, somewhere

between ‘good job’ and ‘bad job’… or between an

A and C.

TARA INCOGNITA: *Enters looking judgmentally

at ME while ME continues to type another

terrible, garbage, unfinished paper; TARA talking

to ME while I still keep working on paper:

I’ve been told I lack time management skills- I

guess I need to learn how to train time, manage

it, harness it, discipline it just like I am constantly

trained and managed. I don’t think my Time wants

to do that though. My Time has a mind of its own

and it cuts itself into pieces on its own rather

than me having to do that for it. It thanks me for

this freedom.

72

TARA INCOGNITA (to audience): A Lit review –

what does it even do? Besides sifting and sorting

through texts, I mean. It all seems like something

a computer could do better. And then you have to

labor into a “synthesis” something that adds (?),

summarizes (?), coheres (?) all the literature and

info together (??) or something like that, am I

right? You basically ORGANIZE, … no, no you

ORDER these texts together so that they fit into a

coherent formula

ME: From my experience, that’s about how it

goes.

TARA INCOGNITA: But, look at me for once!, just

where the hell does the magical ORDER come

from? Is if from you [***points at ME]? From the

literature and its oh-so “””complex”” [**makes

fun of intertextuality…?

ME: hey, complexity theory is the next BIG THING

in every field. I just know it, man

TARA INCOGNITA: bear with me. Is it from the

professor, the environment, enculturation??

Habituation, discipline, self-discipline?? More

importantly, what is your precious synthesis

actually enacting, performing, doing with itself?

ME: umm the lit review? Well… to be honest …

[**TARA finally has ME’s attention/ME stops

typing]…

even my professors say that it’s impossible to be

original. I guess what we really do is find

literature and put it together like a puzzle. That’s

our job, that’s the academe’s job, to caretake to

knowledge

73

TARA INCOGNITA: Be honest though. Do you

really FEEL that unoriginality? Do you feel like

you wave your magic wand that you get from a

degree, and put things together slightly more

intelligently than ChatGPT? I’m looking for things

ChatGPT can’t do better than anyone from an

academic standpoint and I cant find many—

amassing source information and placing it into

a concise, straightforward passage. I’m certain

that ChatGPT would have done a better lit review

than you, that’s for sure. Maybe ChatGPT would

have gotten an ‘A’

ME: ***outwardly pondering; then JOKINGLY***

Ahh, but could ChapGPT have ever so carefully

talked ‘around’ sources that without making any

implications about the findings of the study that I

can’t make? Because 2/3rds of the sources I

never had the time read, but I read the abstract

and I got the ‘gist’ haha.

Can you blame me? How am I supposed

to magically become an expert on this

abstract topic and find the time to

carefully read a total of 1338 pages of

scholarly text? 3 of my sources were fulllength

books and let me tell you, I SURE

didn’t read them in 4 fucking weeks. I did

that thing a lot where you say “NAME and

NAME (2003) investigated the rodent

population following a venereal disease

outbreak caused by the eating of trash.

Their findings were inconclusive, but my

own study will advance and contextualize

their findings and question by…” blah blah

blah, [sung in an upbeat jingle tune]

74

using everyone’s research as stepping

stones, so I can build what it?!? I don’t

know **smiling now **.

That move^^ gets me away with a lot and

I look pretty smart too, even though I’m

literally in danger of being replaced by a

thing that only reads black-white (1-0s)…

my, WHAT have I come to?

______________________________________________________________________

[**after this scene, TARA and ME sit together for a

bit, distracting me from the very important final

paper being written… oh, who am I kidding, it’s

terrible.

Everyone student knows that you’re not supposed

to “read” scholarly articles, terrible lit, TLDR stuff…

you skim them, get what you need, say thank you,

pay the girl and go home satisfied and unattached.]

TARA finally speaks, this time semi-seriously: Why

does it seem like professors like eating shit? Trash

is all it is. Trash by design, trash theatre, trash all

the way down. I’m telling you, the last living shred

of human dignity and truth is contained in trash.

When you finally realize that, then you are free from

the necessities of academic pomp … … really, the

bullshit MATERIAL NOISE pollution that seems to

characterize this little universe

POETRY/ writing/ CREATING,… in its most

freed form is like a million different left

75

turns. A single move can take you

somewhere bizarrely different from where

you wanted to be in the first place. This is

chaos in practice, because language is

chaos in practice. But be careful because if

you veer too much into uncharted territory

(Terra incognita, perhaps?) you will become

very unacademic, probably nonsensical,

stupid seeming, incoherent even [Is that

scholarship doing its best work? Or is that a

flaw?

]As the best will say, DESIGN is made by

limitations.

As a biologist would say, the body is a lot of

things, most of which are still mysterious, …

but clear the body is pure LIMITATION too,…

so much so that you have to admit that

limitations/ fragmentation are what make

poetry/ Art

AND so-called FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE

possible!

To be continued

76

Genre-Fluid Visual Poetry as a

Methodology

Through writing this illness narrative and through experimentation like

Trach Pt. I, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make my universe

make sense. This creative research has been demanding in the same

ways that typical research is. Spending years contemplating genre-fluid

visual poetry and practicing using it has led me to my present view: that

my genre-fluid visual poetry is a fusion of both creative exploration and

research. But also, genre-fluid visual poetry to me captures

everything—it is, therefore, a lens moreso than a medium.

Importantly, starting with genre-fluid visual poetry has led me to

develop a richer creative research practice that is based on the design

and engineering of an episteme. Not every writer thinks about

epistemes or how they are hidden in writing styles. But using genrefluid

visual poetry, I am interested in how epistemes can be managed

and created for de-colonizing purposes.

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The Power of Creative Research

Without being a genre-fluid visual poet, I would not have considered

epistemologies, or my own epistemology as part of my writing. In

truth, designing or engineering an epistemology seems like a strange,

overtly challenging thing to do. However, genre-fluid visual poetry can

achieve this because of its ability to work with everything, between and

beyond genre-based restrictions.

Epistemic engineering essentially is starting from nothing and rebuilding

a thought system. But you aren’t really starting from nothing,

you have your own background and culture as well as the readers’. So,

it’s as though you have to continually look for universals rather than

tiny, specific parts of the world.

This is the opposite of typical scholarly work which looks for those tiny

specific, detailed findings. As I mentioned, the inefficiency and trouble

with looking for “tiny specific” findings is that you have to use a

footpath to get there. This means that you have no choice but to rely on

disciplinary sense and mediating ideas, the use of which contribute to

the dominance of the academe and the epistemic foundations it has.

With my own research that specifically wants to engage with

alternative reasoning styles, I want to find where the larger things can

be made from the smaller things, therebye drawing from a “universal

narrative”. But also, when I think of a “universal narrative”, I am

considerate that there are multiple “universal narratives” and that what

makes them universal is that the components fit together holistically,

realistically, and in a sensory-connected way. Early on in my research, I

would use the term “phenomenological” to explain how I think of

literary meaning as sensory. But at the moment of writing this, I am

much more keen on considering meaning as provided through

“embodiment” and that making sense of texts returns some universal

meaning to ones body. But if I were to map out this relationship

between a body and meaning, I would want to draw too from

78

complexity theory and the shapes it provides—networks, chaos, and

reasoning through a community.

Beyond that, it is possible to shape a new relationship between

meanings and bodies through connecting different shapes from different

disciplines, such as neurology. This could, in effect, assist me in

creating a large, post-disciplinary narrative that encounters post-factual

relationships through shape; the post-factual relationships represent

nothing but shape—not theoretical cause or explanation, but just pure

shape. However, my post-disciplinary emphasis on shape leads me to

suggest too that any “map” of meanings-to-bodies will always lack the

infinite detail that it might have if there were infinite time to map out

this shape and relationship. And this post-disciplinary project is not

meant to be done by one person—it must be an ongoing, collaborative

project. I hypothesize that this map would, in fact, be unfinishable

because more and more connections could be mapped through time.

However, this project might be “locally” finish-able if a researcher

decides to impose theoretical opinions which close ends and limit

connections that can be made.

I bring up this complicated, hypothetical project example because with

my Trach methodology and style, there are many, many, many more

infinite projects that I have discovered. This is why, in my opinion,

modern research ought not to rely so much on “finishing projects” or

“closing off projects”—and humanities research ought not be so

concerned with describing truths. This is because disciplinary stories

furnish facts where they might, instead, provide a community to solve

problems continually4F 9

.

I also bring this up because time and a lack of it has marred my

research, just as it does every researcher. But more importantly, time is

the reason that this project is what it is: I am reacting to the timelines I

have been given and the inappropriateness that deadlines and processes

have been for me and my post-disciplinary thinking, and my genre-fluid

9

In support of de-colonizing educational goals and also the resolving of complex

problems, I would like Trach to have the ability to make knowledge-building and

knowledge-sharing more compatibilist rather than situated in silos.

79

visual poetry. Therefore, my work is Trach genre-fluid visual poetry: it

is what it needs to be. And burying this scholarly excursion in this

illness narrative has brought me freedom and has allowed me to share

unfinished thoughts, in the same way that I share unfinished poems.

_

80

6.Analogy: A Universal Language

Having to deal with schizophrenia, bulimia, and epilepsy since the age

of 18-19 has meant that my relationship to poetry has been shaped by

an urgent need to adapt, communicate fine grains, and bleed words into

reality.

81

As a poet, I break things and do not expect there to be wonderful

“beauty”. I also know and hold that Western aesthetics and modalities

are inherently restrictive and do not collaborate well with shared

humanity, or its direct opposite—divergent ideas. Analogy on the

other hand offers me a means to share my real thinking and

compassion.

For example, my poetry is a form of research to me. In my frezied

note-taking which evolved into my present visual poetry practice, I was

always concerned with the “truth”. But in this, I realized that words

could twist and turn and become their opposite. For instance, analogy

can so easily become the msot concrete representation of facts because

analogy is unfettered by the collapse into concreteness that makes no

universal truth possible – the problem of universals is what a thinker,

interested in the truth, would run into; this problem is the realization

that there are no truths that withstand the test of time, because you and

your body and thinking are all tempered and molded by time. You

cannot say that you are a healthy person without considering how much

this might not be true tomorrow.

The problem of universals is especially difficult to cope with when you

are schizophrenic and your fears become hallucinations and delusions.

The inability to resolve ambiguity is what makes hallucinations and

delusions, or conspiracy narratives for that matter, so viral and

destructive.

“Using Analogy to Embody Complex Truth”

There are many ways that I can explain more about the uses of analogy

for a de-colonizing genre-fluid visual poet. But the most novel aspect of

analogy is that it can handle complex realities, even those that have no

name yet. So a poet is not damned to a heavy reliance on meanings and

knowledge systems.

But also, I have come to the realization that no matter what, your

writing and research always require some amonut of creative truthtelling.

In the same way, a writer that only uses what they can read in a

textbook to figure out what the truth is will be confined in multiple

ways—through their textbook and through their perception of the

82

textbook, and even the ways in which they did or did not read the

textbook carefully.

With multiple ways for a human body to mis-use or mis-represent

truth, there are reasons to rely primarily on analogy and empathydriven

story-telling to represent truth.

My writing/ research style has been refined by a desire to create

moments and experiences moreso than by traditional forms and

techniques. Wanting to bring Trach to an audience has brought me to

experiment more with improvisation and spoken word poetry.

Analog_ is a collage performance of recycled “broken into” poems.

This is what I call it when I take a line, poem, or stanza and I place new

verses in old poems, particularly ones that I believe are not hitting any

hard notes.

The focus with “broken into” collage poems is to relate to the audience

on the deepest level. And for me, that always requires going a little

haywire – going for broke and taking risks, even changing words of

poems as I go. Sometimes, I will bring in diction from poetry that other

writers in the room used. Other times, I will simply enter the audience

physically by taking the mic to their tables.

Analog_

Analog_ is a collage poem that was performed on February 16, 2025 at

People’s Literary Festival sponsorship dinner.

ME:

I call this collection “Analog_” because the definition of analog is a

representation of something in reality with only one continuously moving

variable. An example of an analog representation is a clock with hands moving

– the motion is the single variable, the single thread that allows reality to have

second-to-second presence and visibility. This soleness- the movement of the

hand on a clock- is at once very empowered and very vulnerable because one

83

mistake could leave You, or anyone, without any reference to the actual time,

or the reality that is being recorded through it.

I like this idea of using very basic elements and a sole thread to allow the

deepest truths to make space. But also, I sometimes think of my poetry as

“analog” or basic – bare bones, because it’s just so stripped and primal to get

up and speak, bring fortunes to mind, settle moods and decide what kind of

night You will be having. I hope that this will be a great one!

Also, the word analogue refers to an analogy forsomething else. I will use

both types of analog’s in this collection.

I want to start with a simple given though – which is, of course, a fact about

my work that I will be radically honest about. It is that my poetry, all of it, is

love poetry, no matter what.

Actually, I believe that all poetry is love poetry. Just keep this in mind, if you

can, and you will appreciate my words even more.

To bless this collection, I will start with a hymn. I encourage You to read this

hymn and every poem in this collection out loud:

A hymn

That every poem is a love poem

May it hold your mind and prepare you for

Intrusion, ecstasy?, some knotty game that you are still

learning how to play

Because there are no rules just a desire for instruction or

connection

Because there are no tools or experimentally validated

criteria to inspect such a thing as the ambiguity that makes

art what it is,

And love stands alone as the premise for this befuddlement –

A reciprocation and desire that can know itself before you

know it.

84

As an artist, we are crustaceans … with so much but not

enough time at sea,

Incapable of spending too much time in the sun or in glory

unworthy of physically drowning, sometimes, yet drying out is

always a problem.

_

Spiraling. This falls on me – I must perform its truth

This first poem is called

Because the alternative is agony.

An artist speaks

Because of this.

Notes on a Childhood

Summer: “Because we are

dying”

“This town sucks,” mouths in from us, metabolic things

at the beat of every single second’s break,

hoveling in from foreign cave systems

of rock tradition,

there to steal a break

from secondhand existing.

“Life is now,” adverts wisp

through slicked rote lips of women with creamy paved-in skin,

perfumed loneliness;

and in the heat

of every second

85

of highway’s passing,

graphic foods tease

inward innervation into awareness

like dust

in air

and we “Breathe in. It smells here. I hate vacations.”

.

Beachgoers anoint bodies,

crisped

with caramelized skin, like candied people –

good to the taste,

smelling

of aromatic weed against the throbbed orange sky.

Everyone’s higher

at the drum

of every single second’s

dropping.

And I’ll wish I knew

some itinerant,

or a friend,

to teach me how to roll

so I could choke

and retreat

for just one second

on some of this

cloudy contentedness

that everyone’s so wedded to.

.

.

86

this futile game

And things are made

with mouths to fill up

body cavities

with smaller living things

through sticky gums of innards,

pale vascularity

of utilitary designing—

a chemical obliterating

of a single-second

strikerate.

.

Solar flecks mirage into the greens

and humankind

divorces them from earth,

marking walls of prismaticked banquets

for slave buying.

The sun is the mother

we steal drug money from

all for just a single second

of reveling in stilted grandness,

enamoured just for

a glint, jam or shadow—

You,

living thing,

bound the golded rust gates

to a lavish apartment pool,

nearly begging for breach,

You say,

with dangling locks left relaxing

from dreamy watch guards asleep

with faces dropped in dirty magazines.

It’s too cold to get out now.

The slickness of the water

clings to supple sloughs

and laughs at slipping

appetent hands.

87

And Us,

drowning from

the depth of this trance,

You ask me what I want to do next.

And I wonder why it is

We crave so much

when all We do is take

from the very second

we start living.

_

ME: I wrote that poem when I was 21 years old and got it published. Up to

this day, I still think I had no business writing this type of poem – all about the

limits of life and the human appetite.

Because I was an ignorant little shit, just as I still am. But, also, this shows me

that poetry and art can be imbued with a wisdom that neither the speaker nor

the poet themselves have.

_

So for this next poem, I am working on an “Ode to Ambiguity”. This is not an

ode, however—it is a thank you.

It grew out of the skeleton of a pantoum – so it’s very repetitive. I have since

broken into this poem, which it what I call it when I re-verse and re-place

elements, bringing in some collage parts, handwriting, or improvisation. This

is my way of following the thread and energizing this study again. It is still just

an Ode to Ambiguity, though, so here it is:

Ode to Ambiguity

Day 1: Ambiguous Ambiguity

Whilst stilled and shook

Buried by moon,

I so wish I could deny what I know,

With faith through line breaks—

of ends left thought open

simply to link corners amidst

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To deny what I know.

The edge of a question

to fall in rough trust – mister luster

luminates solace broken

in ways more than one

[i feel I’ve bedded myself

in bony sheets

and my own words don’t

know me or love me

they only conceal me]

giving reason to be apart, denied –

with stolen senses only for this

seizing. Dirt’s only alived outside

becking dred of life’s end

[so i’m lying while saying

all that i am capable of

saying

all that my shrunken

head/heart says

or maybe it’s my nutbag

bones

swooning winds one by one

lose touch

with heat of spaded sun

limped leaves of ebon locus drop

to death.

Note to self or anyone that will listen:

I know that the rain is not for me, but thank you.

Day 2. Ambiguity – the unsettling

For an artist, ambiguity is urgent - it is capital, I hate to say

it, … it’s what you stay up all night trying to catch in stolen

waters, like a toxin in the air – something you are told is

there, fractal and glowing on its own, under pressure like a

diamond, with a mysterious danger… like mold or bacteria… -

we live on this just to feed – crystalize dimensions of the

unknown, and make art through rough and creased wax molds

– that we call “language” – i wish i knew

89

Better words for this

With dirty hands

I string polysyllables along

With the anthem – “I am a poet if I need to be,

but of these words, I am not the master”.

This is why art is survival - it is voyaging without helmets or

gas masks

Into the in-between space –

Of what we know of and what we might realize –

a rapid vortex, of equations, … new logic? – ill logic

things becoming other things – mishappen

and there’s nothing more moving and unsettling

than setting time

by setting words down

and speaking them

and standing still—the poem fills in a shape.

Trying to put perfect notes to this frame without overt

exposure—

sweat and tears, rapid breathing,…

radiation burns, and mis-used, offensive diction, metaphors

to cancel

defenseless, I can’t be proud of this.

But this is not about pride–

This is fingers that move to a song without yet knowing it:

Every song starts with a small drum –

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘

thum thum thum, thum thum thum

- one beat and a single note

being one meter

that walks alone – defying a single dance –

taking a stand – a pattern to behold –

hellbent on being

one

part

of the motion

that keeps

us all going.

90

_

Day 3.

A miracle, a mistake, a miracle, a mistake

Love is the wind speaking to you in whistles and moans,

waiting and wanting to be picked up,... have a voice and nose

slits, papercuts to write poetry with

unless that desire is something I made up… in my poetic

trance, or my even more mundane delusional mind. I’ve been

told it makes things up,

makes things rise… a miracle a mistake

a miracle, a mistake,

all for this terrible love poem…

a miracle, a mistake, a miracle, a mistake

I have free-climbed to this inescapble junction

With conviction,--an impossible spot for rescuers to reach—

I know what I have gotten myself into.

I cannot be saved.

My last words then are these: “Love is beautiful and

uncontrollable – it makes mistakes. It is often ugly and

despairing… desperate to make artifacts of its own existence.

It is greedy

As you,

And lovely as you too.”

I jot down poems to give love formal space in this universe –

black type on white paper usually. With signs and unmeasured

rhythms, symbols I might have just made up.

The performer spends years honing their craft …. just to

control ….. Love

This is a miracle and a mistake.

A miracle, a mistake.

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Day 4. An unfinishable poem 10

Love is urgent

And slow

Holy and profane

Love is sexual but it doesn’t have to be.

Or so I’ve heard –

Love is scattered, untrustworthy, uncertain, sometimes

abusive, unclean, and thorough…

For better or for worse

Love is Godly and also very human

Love is abundant, as you can see,… love is sacred, willing,…

abstruse, disgusting, well-bled.

It speaks to you in a secret language,

A new kind of rhyme.

A fortune in alphabet soup

And hunger that makes you take bets,

And use vulgarity until your dying day.

Love might be empathy, wishfulness and no desire to work

harder than you have already been.

Love is silence.

Yes Love, You, Love,

already know what you are doing – shall I speak to you in

unnecessary jargon, hymns, tangential miseries, or memes?

It’s all the same in this universe to me.

Love.

“If I color myself with all the beauty of the world, maybe I’ll

disappear. If I did that, would I still be enclosed in principle,

in matter. All people ever are present in the trees in a

transition state.

Loving the incongruous shame, and the beauty to behold

without first knowing its name

Shame

Love

10

This poem is unfinished.

92

Love is persistence, I will tell you, for good reasons or wrong,

mind you. Love is patient and adoring, obsessed, and

drooling… Love will force you to think of reasons why you

should hold your tears

Because it’s not appropriate to have anger, fear, or lust.

Love,

Is stolen art just begging to be stolen.

Love is longing—love will leave you

Naked, lonely, taken, guilty, invisible?, misshapen.

Love is mercy

Love is plain

Love is unfinished

Growing

Love is an unfinished poem

93

Analogy as Shape?

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make my universe make sense. Because

epistemic engineering essentially is starting from nothing and re-building a

thought system. But you aren’t really starting from nothing, you have your

own background and culture as well as the readers’. So, it’s as though you

have to continually look for universals rather than tiny, specific parts of the

world.

This is the opposite of typical scholarly work which looks for those tiny

specific, detailed findings. As I mentioned, the inefficiency and trouble with

looking for “tiny specific” findings is that you have to use a footpath to get

there. This means that you have no choice but to rely on disciplinary sense

and mediating ideas, the use of which contribute to the dominance of the

academe and the epistemic foundations it has.

With my own research that specifically wants to engage with alternative

reasoning styles, I want to find where the larger things can be made from the

smaller things, therebye drawing from a “universal narrative”. But also, when

I think of a “universal narrative”, I am considerate that there are multiple

“universal narratives” and that what makes them universal is that the

components fit together holistically, realistically, and in a sensory-connected

way. Early on in my research, I would use the term “phenomenological” to

explain how I think of literary meaning as sensory. But at the moment of

writing this, I am much more keen on considering meaning as provided

through “embodiment” and that making sense of texts returns some universal

meaning to ones body. But if I were to map out this relationship between a

body and meaning, I would want to draw too from complexity theory and the

shapes it provides—networks, chaos, and reasoning through a community.

Beyond that, it is possible to shape a new relationship between meanings and

bodies through connecting different shapes from different disciplines, such as

neurology. This could, in effect, assist me in creating a large, post-disciplinary

narrative that encounters post-factual relationships through shape; the postfactual

relationships represent nothing but shape—not theoretical cause or

explanation, but just pure shape. However, my post-disciplinary emphasis on

shape leads me to suggest too that any “map” of meanings-to-bodies will

94

always lack the infinite detail that it might have if there were infinite time to

map out this shape and relationship. And this post-disciplinary project is not

meant to be done by one person—it must be an ongoing, collaborative

project. I hypothesize that this map would, in fact, be unfinishable because

more and more connections could be mapped through time. However, this

project might be “locally” finish-able if a researcher decides to impose

theoretical opinions which close ends and limit connections that can be made.

I bring up this complicated, hypothetical project example because with my

Trach methodology and style, there are many, many, many more infinite

projects that I have discovered. This is why, in my opinion, modern research

ought not to rely so much on “finishing projects” or “closing off projects”—

and humanities research ought not be so concerned with describing truths.

This is because disciplinary stories furnish facts where they might, instead,

provide a community to solve problems continually4F 11 .

I also bring this up because time and a lack of it has marred my research, just

as it does every researcher. But more importantly, time is the reason that this

project is what it is: I am reacting to the timelines I have been given and the

inappropriateness that deadlines and processes have been for me and my postdisciplinary

thinking, and my genre-fluid visual poetry. Therefore, my work is

Trach genre-fluid visual poetry: it is what it needs to be.

The Story of Stories

You are reading this story of stories and supplying meaning to it while it

supplies its own and destroys itself. You are now in a sizzling network with

this writing and the many attempts and steps of reading it have changed you

physically. And there is movement, not just mental ghosts or the abstraction

that becomes bitter, burdensome art. You should know me better than that—

insolvent vagueness is the enemy of great poetry—but this story of stories is

no exception, unfortunately, to the ultimate incompleteness of every logical

system and I will contradict myself to maintain some sense of normalcy. Isn’t

that what every story does? Isn’t it uncanny?

11

In support of de-colonizing educational goals and also the resolving of complex

problems, I would like Trach to have the ability to make knowledge-building and

knowledge-sharing more compatibilist rather than situated in silos.

95

Everything is motion, because by the time you know it well enough to say you

know it, it is already in motion—the story, the system eludes language itself

and you cannot grasp what it means to know through this sense of knowing,

labelled with the word “known”. The smallest instances of movements are

quantum particles becoming energy, color, shapes, and matter, and You;

direction is only imposed when a human viewer takes the time to measure it.

Before measurement, particles are in a superposition, described as being both

directions, both choices evinced at the same time. Thus, by virtue of the

material we are made of, there is imperfection, constant movement, and

unfinishment to every language or pure human experience as it is felt in some

strange art, or composition of a story. To fill in gaps, our minds or something

that possesses them supplies a qualitatively valuable narrative—the meaning

or myth. A story must find its place amongst the trees with a quantitative

location and shade, or the desert, or the overwhelming vacuity of an absence

of space. I am grateful for infinite space, but don’t know what to do with it

and its hidden roses. And the stories of stories are no exception because

stories maintain stories on granite, or concrete, or something else challenging

to throw away. There is no question that stories are a part of bodies but also

not—stories go where they want. They say “I will, without a doubt, have to

spread myself thin here. But in the end, I will invite you to my humble abode

with scattered notes, books, food wrappers, and probably some pests. I will

clean up the day before you come by and I will clean the toilet too just in

case. I will wipe the table off and remove debris from the kitchen table and

show you what I have even if its just old tortillas. You have no idea how much

I have … just the utmost belief in your unquestioning warmth. This is an

important story and I cannot contain it alone you see.”

I remember clearly that back in 2014, while I journalled for recovery and the

recuperation of truth that I encountered many paradoxes. I also scooped

plenty of classic philosophers on accident, all while not even having read these

classic thinkers – this demonstrated to me that theory shapes are actually

quite similar across minds, and encounterable through different

circumstances.

In other words, you can encounter the totality of all theories ever made by

sitting alone with nothing but a piece of paper, a pencil, and curiosity 12 . This

12

This reminds me of the question posed by Plato’s Credo: can philosophy be done in

isolation, or is it a combination of thinking from other wholes? Or in modern

language, can the whole of mathematics be discovered by someone in isolation who

has never learned it.

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is a compelling idea because culturally, it is more common to feel that great

theorists are rare geniuses, and that winners in the knowledge-management

game, whose thinking has become a dominant ideology or epistemic practice,

deserve what they won. But in reality epistemic dominance is more of a

function of convention and conversion than anything else.

This is why I believe that the most famous thinkers are not special, they are

overly typical, so typical in fact that their words and thinking can speak across

boundaries of time to become recognized as “useful” and “paradigmatic”. This

is what makes a researcher very good and important—the translatability of

their research into information that can resolve real, global problems.

Obviously, this is my opinion. However, if you take the time to try on this

“sheer ordinariness” perception of all researchers, especially the most predominant,

then you will hopefully realize how helpful this perception is.

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7. A Place of Abundance

As an English graduate student, it has been noticeable how ill-suited academia

is for inspecting and answering big questions that are relevant to all people, not

just academics. With my genre-fluid visual poetry, I have always been

concerned with big questions, authentic research, and authorizing ambiguity

and its shapes—ugliness, presumption, ineptness even.

Because I have written this illness narrative in an academic setting, I have

contemplated for many years the ways in which genre-fluidity and genre-fluid

visual poetry can address truths, emotions, and beings that are usually left

unembodied, or disembodied.

When thinking about epistemic practices in our disciplinary educational

institutions, there are reasons to wonder: what is missing? That is why the call

to de-colonize education has emerged for practical reasons, and also as a

means to overcome gaps in knowledge-making capabilities. At the same time,

simply saying that the educational system should be “de-colonized” is a first

step among many first steps towards first steps in support of that goal (decolonizing

education)—this is not a typo, I truly believe that the first steps

towards de-colonization are this difficult to get to.

This last concept chapter, “A Place of Abundance”, is meant to detail a

how genre-fluid visual poetry brings attention to missing histories, missing

questions, and hidden spaces apropos to meaning making. This concept

chapter relies much more on meditations and thought experiments than visual

elements. But these pieces below use the context and vocabulary of the visual

work in previous chapters.

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Write Sheer Ordinariness: Don’t

Self-censor (and Don’t Narrow

your Scope)

With sheer ordinariness, I have done my Trach genre-fluid work, and I also

created Trach de-colonizing methodology. With sheer ordinariness, I don’t

have the patience to write a sub-standard literature review, because, quite

frankly, the mountain of articles to read about any one, small issue or topic is

too much to trek.

Don’t get me wrong—reading is an important task, but the heuristics used to

narrow down a literature review are often unnecessarily rooted in disciplinary

epistemes, analogies, and expectations. For example, if I were to search a

scholarly database for the meaning of life, I would get a swath of sources from

multiple fields. These fields would break down this question, “the meaning of

life”, into minute packets of “stuff” that is better defined, so that it can be

studied in the respective field. For example a psychology study might use

surveys to consider human perceptions of the meaning of life; a philosophy

paper review the definitions of “meaning” and “life” and compile different

analogies that support potential complications to the question.

I hate to say it, but none of these hundreds of thousands of studies would

really help me figure out what the meaning of life is. To be more clear, none

of these academic studies directly inspect the meaning of life, or even concede

that it is possible to directly inspect the meaning of life. Instead each of them

performs what I call the “talking about it” fallacy 13 . I found the same fallacy to

be embedded in ethics classes, visual rhetoric classes, and nearly all of my

English courses: you would read about significant issues in ethics, but you

wouldn’t learn “ethics”; we would learn about visual rhetoric theories, but we

couldn’t deploy them using creative techniques; we would learn all about

13

It was Kurt Goedel who said that talking about something is not the same thing as doing

something. This is fundamental to my post-disciplinary, genre-fluid visual poetry

scholarly practice: I want to take action instead of talking about issues, enact

problem-solving techniques instead of talking about them, do de-colonization instead

of talking about it, embodying honesty instead of using standard genres and speaking

styles to demonstrate credibility.

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how colonized the study of rhetoric is, but still use the same rhetorical models

as a foundation. Also, of course you cannot deploy “visual rhetoric” in a visual

rhetoric class, because no one will listen to you in academic if you don’t learn

how to write a standard essay 14 —also, a great deal of what you read in a

visual rhetoric class are standard essay anyways, because most scholarship in

visual rhetoric is standard essays, just like a great deal of research into decolonizing

education is standard essays.

I do not want to exaggerate how often this “talking about it” fallacy occurs,

because my real interest is not in eradicating it, but in making it obvious that

there are other options. Similarly, there are other epistemes and practices that

can, potentially, inspect questions that couldn’t be inspected before; there are

ways too that expanding the epistemic allowances and diversity in the

academy can bring with it new and innovative ways to address old questions.

Paradox (the Only truly

Renewable Resource)

As a post-disciplinary genre-fluid visual poet, my present thinking and work is

peppered and powered by paradox – but please don’t make me explain this in

too much detail right here, right now. Anyways, paradox is quite innate to

humanities research and work, and many renowned scholars have based their

work on the discovery and resolution of paradox, particularly through seeing

contradiction as a failure, and then digging into that failure and finding higher

ground. Hegel uses the term “sublation” to refer to this higher ground that

one can access by resolving contradictions. But honestly, it doesn’t matter

what you call it, and also, the idea of “higher ground” implies a hierarchy of

being, which is not necessary 15 .

14

I’ve been told this multiple times, by multiple academics that I should put my

“genre-fluid visual poetry” scholarship, decolonizing methodology into an academic

paper. I hope that it’s clear how much this suggestion misses the point of my research

and project.

15

Via, complexity theory and higher order mathematics, we should keep in mind that

there are infinite, unseeable dimensions, some of which possibly contain life. But

more importantly, these infinite dimensions are accessible through mathematics, but

not completely. See, the incompleteness theorems: my favorite paradoxes of all time.

And complexity makes it so that infinite change is compatible with mathematical

modelling, though not completely yet again.

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But also, screw Hegel—plenty of thinkers have encountered this ‘inverting

paradox’ phenomenon and power, without being given the time or privilege

to write it down and call it a fancy thing. That is why scholarly scooping is

actually an important, studyable phenomenon to me, a post-disciplinarian,

rather than a scholarly failure: It demonstrates how close in thinking

researchers can be, despite a separation of time and experiences. Actually, I

became fascinated with how much my ideas resembled those of famous

thinkers

I realized years later, particularly when I entered a Master’s of English

program, that many of my personal observations were actually made by

philosophers, linguists, and some other (paternalistic) influences that I

genuinely did not know of—for example, though I knew who Descartes was,

I did not know about their work in depth. This phenomenon of encountering

findings and paradoxes that have already been found has been a big part of my

research, ever since I realized that I scooped Derrida in my 2013 scattered,

recovery notes.

Back then, I was trying to put into words the paradox that ran through all of

language. This paradox, I recall, is not a new take on what language

contributes to being because once a statement is made in a factual form, there

can always be alternatives to that so-called factual statement, so the creation

of a ‘factual statement’ cedes its opposite into existence. Because of this, you

become aware that there is a fractionality or a spectrum to both realness and

truthfulness (on the level of language at least).

I realized all on my own that factuality is really just a temporal value shade, or

a more stable untruth. For example, as soon as you say “The sky is blue.”, the

statement becomes just a little bit untrue because not all skies are blue, all the

time. Therefore the substance of truth, is untruth and the substance of

untruth is truth –really, it is all the same, just one substance that creates

truths and untruths, so the “one substance” ought to be inspected, not the

binary conditions of truth and untruth.

And so it is – researchers are concerned with the substance of truth and

untruth, rather than just Truth (truths and untruths combined). Hopefully,

this makes it more likely that patient, thorough research be supported, instead

of limiting questions to “yes” or “no” questions. The opposite of complex

questions are these single-switch, two condition questions in which “this” or

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“that” are the Truth. What this means is that a thing is always, invariably

connected to its opposite or what it is not. This hypothesis or language-sense

might have been elucidated many, many, many times, or thought up in many,

many heads.

For example, the statement that “the sky is blue” is intended to be factual, yet

the factuality depends on the solidity of what it meant by “blue” or “the sky”

or the permanence of the statement itself (i.e. is the sky going to be blue

forever? If not, some might say that the statement is not factual). In addition

to this, while

With the perspective of a genre-fluid visual poetry researcher, I can tell you

that some “facts” are malleable and also based on the disciplinary context in

which that “fact” is being investigated. For example, using the question “What

color is the sky?” here is a list of answers that you might obtain from a

spectrum of disciplinary perspectives (keep in mind that these are not my

fields of expertise):

• Physicist

• Artist

• Philosopher

Beyond these, every field has multiple sub-fields and expert types which will

have a different answer to the question of “what color is the sky?”.

Paradox: From Language to

Logical Incompleteness

While I journaled through the idea of language-based paradox, I wondered

too what make factuality possible or if there was a “truth” in concept that can

be grasped and managed. Many great thinkers have contributed to this idea of

what “truth” can be or whether or not it exists. But for the sake of this

chapter, I must share with you my own take: The question doesn’t matter – it

is a red herring. If you want to argue some stance about this question of

whether or not “truth” exists, you certainly can. But my own research is

involved in concept systems which act even without the researcher’s desire

for them to act. If belief is an action and the belief in truth is a concept, then

conceptually, a belief in truth exists that causes actions, all of which have

consequences.

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Remember chaos and my adoration of a meta-language? A theoretical metalanguage

is nothing more than a way to talk about first layers of thinking and

move beyond. Ideally, a meta-language would be able to analyze those layers

of thinking together and also post some relationships or future movements.

Complexity theory, for me, was a very exiting field to fit into this “metalanguage”

gap because it has a closeness both to quantitative certainty and

uncertainty itself – it is clearer to say that complexity theory is actually all

about uncertainty, or the complications in neat patterns of data that used to

be “good enough” for the purposes of a scientist, business manager,

statistician, or analyst. Let it be known too that complexity theory has

become more solvent because of its use in corporations and because of its

usefulness in solving corporate problems: like how to transport Amazon

products across the world most cheaply, with the least amount of labor.

Later, I tried to figure out what it meant that there can be concordances of

truth perceptions or factual statements despite people having radically

different definitions of simple things like “blue”. For example, an artist has a

very different definition of blue than a psychologist or a neurologist. A poet

too would define blue in a very different way, potentially in a poetic way.

do this, and also leave space for humility and poetry as an epiphenomenon. To

me, poetry is my native language and therefore, poetry is nothing but

honesty.

Asking Impossible Questions, Finding Impossible

Solutions

My genre-fluid visual poetry illness narrative, as you know, is an expansion on

what genre-fluidity, visual poetry, and illness narratives can do. It is also an

attempt to bring attention to alternative awarenesses and the presence of

epistemologies in all writing and research. Epistemologies are the reason why

some questions are relegated to the realm of disciplinary experts, while others

can only be talked about through myths and musings.

What I have tried to do with my genre-fluid visual poetry is bring hidden

questions to the forefront, highlighting the common humanity in basic

questions of truth. This has been serious, methodical work for me and I am

only beginning to share my findings and approach to studying impossible

questions.

To end this chapter, I want to share Act II of Trach Pt. I. This playscipt

dramatizes the ways in which my research is both extremely pertinent but also

extremely challenging. It is so challenging, in fact, that my genre-fluid visual

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poetry innovations have been used throughout this illness narrative in order to

provide groundwork while also noting my many failures and shortcomings.

ACT II: Tara lives!

SCENE 1

WELL, HERE WE GO AGAIN

[This scene takes place in my room again. It is

dark – night time and quiet, lonely. This time, I have to

write a thesis proposal, but I am struggling to put my

weird research into words. I literally sweat with stress

and push myself to drum up something in the mere

hours I have to get my work done.

Then, Tara joins the party-not-party to give me some

creative direction…]

ME: Well, Tara, if you could, please shut up while I try to

write my paper. Not to be bishy (>) but I’m running on 2

hours and 36 mins of sleep according to my fitbit and

about to cry for no reason except everything

TI: I’m telling you – I got the answer to all your problems.

It’s like you see everything but nothing at the same time.

Its chronic obedience and its worse than “stupidity”,

whatever that is anymore – as though “intelligence”

were ever anything more than a construct invented to

justify racism and prejudice, economic disparity,

standardized tests, and an over-proceduralized

education system

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ME: **too tired to be upset, but seriously about to cry

with rage over my inability to write** what exactly do you

mean by “overly-proceduralized”? Are you telling me

that there’s just one step, on procedure, one

standardized test amongst many that just breaks the

totality of education?!? It’s just wrong tiny thing that

becomes too much and the entirety of education

collapses under the weight of that tiny error

**I stand up to stretch and put water on

my face from the dirty bathroom sink with

a shower that is full of mold, so I never

use it**

**Yelled out from the bathroom with the sink

running** – I swear you are worse that Me (and

every paper about education ever) with your 99

opinions about everything but no explanations.

TI: **unphased **

Well you and I both know that Chaos Theory actuates

that “One STRAW” can indeed induce the collapse of

education. But I don’t care - Actually, what I’m saying is

that it’s all fkcd – “EDUCATION” we call it - which is why

I am not going to bother writing a paper about the One

Problem in Education to Rule them All,…. In an attempt

to find 99 ways to say “it’s fucked” that haven’t already

been said before in 99 different ways.

I prefer to leave the paper writing to the paper-writers…

**Tara lays down on my bed and takes my writing spot**

ME: **I return to the bed to see Tara has taken over my

computer and is typing**

What the? Suddenly you want to actually help me write?

I thought you weren’t a paper-writer…

TI: Your proposal? No, I’m not writing that thing, at least

not in a direct way. I have a better idea

[[Tara keeps typing while I hover above the bed,

unsure of what to do or where to sit since I don’t

have any chairs in my bedroom (IT’S LITERALY a

laundry room that triples as a storage room).

Looking around for a few seconds, I decide

reluctantly to sit inside a box that used to hold air

conditioning filters. Why? Because the enclosure

of a box is oddly comforting.]]

105

ME: I will give you 10 minutes to write something while I

sit in my box and contemplate how bad I am at grad

school, and how I’m $103,000 in debt…. **Sitting in the

box hunched over, having a minor panic attack***

(talking to myself): I wasted so much time

[[[While Tara excitedly types who knows what -, I

think about the origin of the word “tuition”: It is

from the Latin words tuitiō and tuēri which

translate to “guarding”, “protecting”, “observing”,

or “seeing”.

Compare this with “intuition” which comes from

intuitio and intuitionem. The root word “in-“

means “at OR on”, and “-tuitio” means, again, to

guard or observe……

So tuition is providential of “seeing”, while

intuition is being inside of “the seeing”, or beings

its very conduit – instead of peering at “the

seeing” from the outside in.

In modern days, you have to pay money to get this

“seeing” and “guardianship”–“tuition”. It certainly

has become a commodity … something that

requires your obedience – in thought, in the ways

that you “see” and pass on your seeing to other

people. There is a price, after all, for this

“guardianship” that goes beyond the money.

Intuition, on the other hand, is free. ]]]

**With these thoughts, I somehow fall asleep

while Tara continues to write**

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SCENE 2

“’On measuring up”’

Alternative title: “I wish my problem

was imposter syndrome”

[[It’s 8am-ish in the morning and Tara beams

joyously at the laptop, in awe of their creation]]

***TARA talks excitedly to no one but themselves about

their work of art – a trachy playscript****

TI: Now this is shaping upit!!! the bad choices, the

ways that I am not writing a good paper, or a good

illness narrative are more useful and provide an extra

layer of fluency, FREEDOM, CAPACITY to re-interpret

analogies as Wholes

[At this point,… Tara pensively, curiously

scratches their chin…. Distinctly at a loss for words,

which is not like them]

TI: YES! And It is all mine, and yours if you would like it –

the in-betweenness, the messiness, … the outliers that

mess up every pattern in our mathematical awareness.

You - a baby theoretician or baby academic, a storyteller,

or genre-fluid poet or something ---- YOU can

use it! THE MESSY CHAOS OF IT ALL. You know what I

mean?

** despite extreme fatigue I am intrigued, enamoured

even. But I still don’t know how to use Trach. What are

my steps? What can I do to make this ambiguous,

EVERYTHING, Trach stuff work its magic? – and does it

even have “magic”, or is Trach bound to be terrible

looking, all the time always????? Will it ever be

understood??? Should I care??? **

107

ME: So, I could use Trach to satirically tell a story about

my illnesses? I guess that will help me write my illness

narrative,… even though I don’t really care to – the world

has quite enough solipsistic memoirs….

TI: Then Trach say : DON’T WRITE AN ILLNESS

NARRATIVE. Or better yet, write your illness narrative by

EXPLODING it with the extra stuff, the “bad” choices – the

inexcusable diction choices, the hopeless ugliness and

typographical errors --- ALL THINGS THAT GET WORSE

THE MORE YOU PROCRATINATE ON finishing the stupid

thing. This ugliness, tangential-ness, and lack of

coherence proves that you are putting in words (or

language) things that haven’t been put into words before.

ME: Maybe you’re right. Maybe Trach is an even better

theoretical meta-language than complexity theory,

mathematics (which is incomplete, by the way), logic

(which is incomplete too), or anything else I’ve found and

tried to use as a lens. Did I tell you about “postdisciplinarity”

yet?? – IT’S REALLY QUITE A USEFUL,

SOPHISTOCATED CONCEPT. I DEFINE IT AS-----

***I ABRUBTLY GET CUT OFF***

TI: Stop!! If you start babbling on about postdisciplinarity

again, I swear…

you will just have to see it to understand, but Trach is,

well, Impermanent. Just like your genre-fluid visual

poetry, Trach suffers from a lack of a home discourse –

no words can quite place it into a clean narrative, and

the more you try to explain it, the more you are just

appealing to LOGOS and colonized interpretations of

“media”, “genre”, and “fluidity”

ME: Okay, you’re right.

108

TI: But Trach, because it is the extra stuff – the nonpattern

patterns, the outliers, the noise in the system,… I

can do whatever I want with it,…

ME: And I can hide it all in satire, poor formatting and

an (ironic) attention to detail. I can even use Trach to

satirize theory itself – create a theory within a theory, a

project within a project. It can be never-ending, and

abundantly non-descriptive!!! I am already doing this

anyways! Maybe this Trach isn’t such a bad starting

place after all, especially because I have nothing else

to work with --- thanks to my mental health issues

SCENE 3:

“WHERE IS TRACH?”

TI: So, let me emphasize again IMPERMANENCE: You are

working on a genre-fluid visual poetry illness narrative,

Correct?

ME: Yes, of course. I have to write a stupid thesis too, something

that provides a unifying (epistemically oppressive)

theoretical basis to this Illness narrative (so that it fits

into hegemonic institutional knowledge structures).

TI: Certainly then you have nothing but obligations to the context

– the thesis itself is not the problem,… but the thesis

timelines and graduate expectations- and the media –

the illness narrative in genre-fluid visual poetry – all

have the potential to structure your project for you. This

is a lack of freedom that most writers consent to,… but

for us, obviously we want to pursue questions that

outside of the academe, And thus, we must innovate our

scholarly languages and forms

ME: Thanks for stating the obvious. I wish I could communicate

these obvious necessities to my graduate program

109

advisors. Ironically, I haven’t had much luck because I

haven’t buried my thinking into disciplinary languages

and discussions yet, because I’m too busy working on

designing the (post-disciplinary) media itself

TI: Sure, but how about you reframe your researcherly task?

ME: How so? I’ve been trying to finish this thesis for literally 5

years. I am pulling my hair out at this point

TI: It’s easy – have some humility and realize that NO ONE takes

you seriously anyways

ME: Gee thanks. I think I knew that already – that is a problem

to me, by the way! I would like to be taken seriously, not

thought of as a schizophrenic, off the rails,

110

contemplative poet who transgresses norms because

I’m bored of writing scholarly papers

TI: Think of it this way: You are a foolish grad student, a creative,

not exactly a trained scholar – these are truthful. Believe

it or not, this is most empowered status you could have

because your only role is to tell a story, bring forth

111

images … narrate a collective consciousness, step in and

step out of your own body as needed. YOU are an image,

a translucent character, not a being in your own illness

narrative – because the human mind is not made to

enter the consciousness of another person,… because all

your advisors ever gripe about is making sure that

whatever your thesis is, it must locate itself in the

DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSES that abound

This is troubling to you: Because you – a POET – know that

POETRY IS NOTHING BUT HONESTY. And Genre-fluid

visual poetry is honesty, that drips into things other than

simple words – it is a willingness to break form and

convention if necessary in order to tell the story. So

DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSES are just another storytelling

tool,… but they are not the only one.

ME: BRUTAL observations again. To be honest, HONESTY is the

reason why I am so, well, stressed out. Like how am

I supposed to write an illness narrative when I don’t even

care about my issues??? Am I supposed to pretend that

my illnesses are unique, and that they eclipse so much

of me that my research is literally placed in that lens

forever?? It is confusing because literally, I am doing

this work in an English Dept that understands a Crip

Theory perspective of illness as a label, an identity, a

new way of thinking and feeling.

And crip-ness and crip theory suffer from the same Problem of

Universals that every theory and field does::: What can a

crip theorist say universally about schizophrenia,

bulimia nervosa, or epilepsy?? The answer is possibly

nothing. EXCEPT THAT EVERY BODY SUFFERS, one way

or another. And the result is that—

***I RUN OUT OF WORDS UNEXPECTEDLY***

112

ME: … I just don’t know what to do anymore. You can call it

analysis paralysis, writer’s block, depression (??),

procrastination, Imposter Syndrome (if only I cared…),

I’m not trying to force anything!– except I am obligated to explain

so much in this gd graduate program! I cannot even use

a word or create a word (like Post-disciplinarity) and

use it to full effect without defining it, stratifying its place

in an architexture OR the textual body of THE DISCIPLINE

– like anyone needs to read a 20-pg paper about a teeny,

tiny organizing concept, a teeny tiny part of my actual

research. At that pace, I will never get to my actual

research – I’ll be stuck writing literature reviews about

minutia for DECADES

TI: Ah yes, the One and Only DISCIPLINE

the Post-discipline.

and its exteriority,

ME: Be patient. Don’t make fun of post-disciplinarity. And I won’t

make fun of Trach

TI: I really could not give fewer fucks, but Trach and Trachiness

is much more of a solution than you think it is. It’s much

more than meets the eye ----

ME: …more than the SUM of its PARTS, perhaps?

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8. Epilogue

I am attempting to “do a lot with a little” with this small collection.

Coincidentally, “doing a lot with a little” is my definition of what visual poetry

does. Readers might be surprised by the things that I call “poetry”, but I hope

readers are also inspired by Trach and that they are able to use some of the

raw, visual story-telling methods I use to create their very own epistemology

in poetry.

To appreciate Trach, I have to emphasize that this is experimental

writing and also process-based work. Most of the work that went into

creating this Trach chapbook has related to articulating a methodology

or process for building a new epistemic “folding”. The epistemic folding

implies that the actors or the users of this chapbook, also known as the

readers, are able to both see the epistemic world and also make choices

regarding what they reason towards or against. Readers can and will

find fault and ugliness in this work.

Though I have no challenges to anyone calling this text a book of

“poetry”, my practice is genre-fluid visual poetry. I also consider my

poetry to be a type of research through design, performativity, and

embodiment. Like all research, trial and error, audience interaction,

and recursive revision and re-working are a large part of Trach. That is

why this is just one version of “Trach” and this illness narrative.

Additionally, the breadth of this working concept (Trach: A genre-fluid

visual poetry illness narrative) has made me conceive of multiple

related, or dispersed, narrative products. So, this Trach collection is

merely a sample and part of a larger, potentially infinite, collection of

things that may add to a Trach universe.

I have done this research in such a wild way, so unconstrained from

disciplinary constructs, that many of my notes and ideas are challenging

to fit into any disciplinary frames. That is why I have created the term

114

“post-disciplinary” to describe my own style of research—

acknowledging disciplinary constraints, while also traversing them and

finding design-based solutions for communicating undisciplined

knowledge. My life’s work will be to use them and verbalize them

through Trach multimedia projects.

This research into Trach for epistemic design and epistemic engineering

through poetry has brought me to study logical incompleteness, metascience,

epistemic injustice, de-colonizing methodologies, and artforms

on a continuum.

While my genre-fluid visual poetry research is ongoing, Trach is the

first collection I have created as a result of this process. As always, I

want to privilege readers by suggesting that this be appreciated in

whatever way the reader thinks it ought to be: as art, as research, or as

a sample of a grander project that can emerge via Trach. With this

illness narrative, I am attempting to channel new relationships between

old findings and also demonstrate an alternative epistemic awareness.

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