Everything Stays

An Animation, Some Sprouts of Song, and Poetry from our Collaborative Coven

Lift up anything heavy.
Find a way to make a stranger more comfortable.
Let’s build something better together.

🪨┃🌜┃lunar-lunacy is sort of like a Creekmasons group art project! It’s meant to be a place where anyone who wants to make art can come up with things together. It’s especially geared toward those aspiring to become Adeptus Makers (Creatives who are published by the Content Collective), but we’d love to see you sign up even if you have no desire to ever have your work shared publicly.

This is a mini-oasis in a cultural wasteland where you can earn rep, share and receive feedback, and build connection.

A like ❤️ and a share 🔁 are super welcome as well. Perhaps you know a Liminal Trickster Mystic out there somewhere who is just dying to become a word wielding Lunatic? Send them our way!

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Animation: It all remains

Mason:

Olix

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Song Sprouts and Scraps: Hold It Inside

Mason:

Content Carrier

Home
We hold it inside
We call it silent singing
We hold it inside

Time
If it’s pinned down
With both hands
We call it ecstasy yeah
We hold it inside

Hold tight
One minute
Every hour

Come back
One more step
There’s a distance

Stopping time

Silence

We live life with closed eyes, yeah
And die
But slow now we’re falling
Until the truth is in me

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Poem: Walls

Mason:

EsotericHoe

In the architecture of power, 
walls stand as silent sentinels, 
their presence a testament to the "hardenings of history" 
and each brick serves as building materials of power.  

Ahmed's words illuminate these barriers, not as mere physical obstructions, 
but as the embodiment of systemic oppression, perpetuating a cycle of exclusion and marginalization.

Hardness, in its essence, refers to the resistance of materials to change under force. 
Under pressure, a wall maintains its forms, 
fulfilling its function as 
a barrier, 
a divider, 
a protector. 

Hardness is necessary for a wall to fulfill its function.

Hardness is a quality revealed through an encounter between objects, a visceral clash.
Our bodies, hurled against these walls like pebbles against ramparts, 
bear the accumulated weight of historical struggles etched within our being.

“A wall is what you come up against.” 
It is a physical contact; a visceral encounter. 

A wall is a defense system. 
It is an effect, a coming up against. 
Walls are a response. 

Perhaps, 
if we had not dared to dream of transformation, 
the wall would remain dormant, 
its presence unnoticed. 

Yet, 
it is our desire for change that summons its imposing form, 
a formidable barrier rising in defiance of our aspirations.
This encounter, this visceral clash against the unyielding, 
is often a solitary struggle, 

its contours obscured from the sight of those who have never 
dared to challenge the established order. 
For in the absence of dissent, 
in the quietude of conformity, 
the wall's necessity fades, 
its function redundant.

A wall, in its materiality, embodies resistance—an unwavering bulwark against imposed change.
You can walk into a wall and be hit by something before you become conscious of something. 

When the wall finally does come into view: 
she is not okay, this is not okay; how could i let this happen?

Walls come into mother fucking view.

How can you not see this wall? 
It is all i see and I cannot move anywhere. 
The walls are all around me 

Some perceptions act as invisible walls.
The everyday,
the mundane, 
the ordinary. 
Our data.

A wall can be an atmosphere. 
A wall can be a gesture.

A wall has a job to do. 
A wall has a job description. 
Walls can materialize in job descriptions, confining and limiting opportunities.
The act of resistance, of banging one's head against these metaphorical walls, 
becomes a Sisyphean task, 
the wall's resilience highlighting the entrenched nature of suffering against walls. 

In the process of resistance, 
the wall remains unyielding, and we bear the brunt of the impact.
So it is us that gets sore. 
A wall might be scratched at the surface by encountering an object. 
Scratching at the surface can be scratching the surface. 

To perceive the world through the lens of institutional walls is to grasp the tangible impact of power on our lives. These barriers, erected by institutions, shape our experiences, limiting our movement and shaping our realities. Yet, their presence remains invisible to those who benefit from the systems they uphold, creating a stark divide between those who feel the wall's impact and those who move unimpeded. What is the hardest for some does not even exist for others.

When a whole world is organized to promote your survival, from health to education, to the walls designed to keep your residence safe, to the paths that ease your travel, you do not have to navigate as many walls. You don’t notice the walls. 

The invisibility of walls to those who benefit from the existing power structures further entrenches their power. Recognizing and acknowledging these walls, not as insurmountable obstacles, but as sites of contestation and transformation. Those who don't come up against walls experience those who talk about walls as wall makers.

When you bring up walls, 
you are challenging what lightens the load for some; 
you are questioning how space is occupied as being for some. 
Another way of saying: walls come up when we talk about walls.

We can use wall expressions to talk about the obstacles that prevent us from realizing a desire or completing an action where institutional processes become something that can be touched, making the institutional wall hard. 

In Ahmed's framework, bodies themselves become borders, sites of resistance and control. The ever-present fear of encountering these walls transforms them into an omnipresent companion, a constant reminder of the precariousness of existence for the marginalized.

Walls are erected as mechanisms to control the movement of bodies, 
preventing 'undesirable' bodies from passing through.
When you know you could be stopped at any time, a wall is anywhere and everywhere. 
A border would go with you wherever you go 

A wall can be how you are stopped from residing somewhere. 
Or a wall can be what you experience once you get there. 
Sometimes your own body becomes used as evidence that the walls of which you speak are not there or are no longer there; as if you have eliminated the walls through your own progression.

Walls teaches us that social categories precede a bodily encounter, 
deciding how a body appears in an instant 

We can start to investigate, 
how walls are mechanisms; 
to understand how things keep their place

But also,
A wall: reassembled at the point of shattering.

Walls as defense mechanisms

A wall can become something that feels internal, 
like a voice inside your own head that makes you stumble. 
That doubt is then turned inward: 
a wall can be an obstacle that is created because you doubt yourself. 
Even if this wall feels internal, it does not begin there

This lack of confidence might be attached to you being the being you are; not good enough, not smart enough, or just not, not enough; or too much, it is too much for you; you are too much; that too 

When walls are not revealed, 
it can appear as if we are shattering ourselves
We need a place to go when we are shattered
We might need walls 
The walls come up in the places we go to feel less depleted by walls 

But we must remain cognizant of 
The fragility of shelters: 
You have to work hard just for things to stay up
If what we are building is on grounds that are not our own, 
it can be hard to build anything 

And if you are always building sturdy walls, you have less time to do things in the building when you are constantly doing building work. When you have to fight for an existence, fighting can become an existence. 

Bodies too can be walls
A wall can be what you wake up to 
Talking about walls matters all the more when the mechanisms 
by which we are blocked are less visible.

The house is figured as a zone of intimacy; love literally occupies the walls. The house is not represented as property, but as a space in which they have extended themselves. Their intimacy leaves an impression on the walls. If relationships leave traces on the wall so too does removal of those relationships 

If the walls could talk, what would they say? 
What can we hear beyond the silence that functions as a wall? 

A fragile shelter has looser walls, lighter materials; see how they move.
How easily though without foundations, 
without a stable ground, 
the walls come down. 
That's why we keep each other up. 
We build walls together. 
We support each other's walls. 

Actions that are small can also become a wall. 
A movement is what is built to survive what has been built.

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Ahmed's work serves as a call to dismantle walls, to challenge the status quo, and to envision a world where barriers are replaced by bridges, and where all individuals can move freely and realize their full potential. This piece was inspired by the writings and ideas contained in The Promise of Happiness, Queer Phenomenology, Living a Feminist Life, Complaint and A Feminist Killjoy Handbook all by Sara Ahmed.  

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