bell hooks's bag, a text for a reading at Think Big, Read Library's closing / moving event, 2024.
bell hooks floats down on the air resistance of her red cardigan and picks me up and puts me in her bag. everything smells of tea tree, and i am bumping into the book she is rereading (which is “teachers as cultural workers” by paulo freire). i choose as my bed a pile of old receipts. i read through my bed — she’s bought juice, tea, new glasses frames in green, a book for her goddaughter, and a cinema ticket. to make sure i am comfortable she wraps me in her scarf, which is pink and brown striped, and it smells of imbued warmth. i feel like a pupating moth. bell stands up and since we are now on a street, she begins to walk down it. the receipts rustle as the bag sways from side to side in the rhythm of her gait, and the sounds form an ambient circle like the recordings of different environments you can apparently relax to, like rainforests in brazil or rivers in iceland. i never listen to these because i think about the decimation of forests and rivers and become very unrelaxed. but i am relaxing right now and listening to the live performance of bell hooks’s bag. in the peripheries of the rustle and group clink of her keys i can hear that bell has met a friend on the street and they are catching up; he has invited her to a buddhist doom metal gig later. i think that this will sound really good through the bag if she decides to go and if she’s happy to have me in her bag still. in the back of my mind though i worry that she has forgotten i am here, and that events will unfold in which i disrespect her privacy via my unavoidable presence in the bag.
as she walks, a pressure change: the bag is floating, i think bell floating too. i realise it is because she has begun thinking about herself, and so the three of us, bell, bag and i have been osmosed into the fuzzy patchwork of her thoughts. i barely noticed myself dissolving into small molecules and being reconstituted, it was so quick and easy. i greedily want it to happen again in the future, and my hope hatches my own fuzzy patchwork of thoughts inside hers, like when one cell engulfs another. being now inside the bag inside her mind i am feeling the same kind of agonised excitement of being in a library, seeing so many pathways i could choose and knowing i cannot choose all of them, even if i lived so long that people started considering me ancient. the co-ordinates of my potential bursting point become visible. but, bell makes it easier for me because she has attended to the seams, passages, guides and maps. i notice the frontier, and my shape changes, but i pass easily into the next space. she has worked its threshold and i can see how often her footsteps have returned here to spend new times. i had imagined the spaces past the thresholds would be like rooms or caves but they are more like smoke rings that could hold, or the flight paths of owls in return. i move into this dissolved container whilst still nestling in the bag, doubly sheltered. i’m not worried anymore that she has forgotten me in her bag, i know now that this whole thing is on purpose. she put me in her bag to access once again the kind of cruising sensitivity needed to write. i look up at and around to her as she speaks and spoke in an archaeological, homing way. i realise she doesn’t even have to go anywhere else at all, she likes being where she is. stuff goes infinitely inward not infinitely outward. she would be a burrowing animal, one who knows how to scoop out a dwelling. the thoughts in here are made up of emergences tunneled into with yearning hands.
she reaches into her bag with her yearning hand and wipes some of the scum off my heart by accident picking up her keys. she’s begun thinking about the doorway, sustenance, grief, the buddhist doom metal and possibilities of a falafel wrap, so i spill right out of her mind again in the bag and we go to the gig together.
concurrently was making a radio show for Sad*Crab Radio on HKCR.