Decreation - takahē

sometimes i think my name was given to me, in open upturned palms, as a blank slate.
who is tremendous. a beautiful and fleeting glimpse of a world so slight before it is already taken away from you.
beautiful girls in muslin dresses

I can’t believe I have to keep feeding this body til I die

Decreation is a neologism coined by Simone Weil, which she describes as a process of
‘undoing the creature in us’—an ‘undoing of the self’.
in order to undo our desires, Simone Weil argues, we must decreate ourselves.
did you know that you do not have to consume something in order to love it?

to abandon the desire to consume and undo everything in our wake . . .

i fell asleep reading the footnotes of Decreation.
in the dream, the surgeon asked me something like, when did this symptom begin? and is there anything that worsens it?
i said, i thought that if she excised my flesh i would feel better.
i felt guilty, so guilty for being sick.
on the operating table, the radio is outpouring pure silver, static blood. and she asked me
what it felt like. i said, ‘it feels like a cold blunt object pushing down underneath my skin.’

Do you see the money that colonises our blood?

‘Ekstasis, literally “standing outside oneself,” a condition regarded by the Greeks as typical of mad persons, geniuses, and lovers.’

this is how you can feel the heart of a person racing as they spin out on the highway, even
when they are hundreds of metres from you. or how you can unravel something through
thought, bringing it into reality, as though from a distance.

Everything decays and collapses in on itself.

And so many days pass in the epicentre of my loneliness

I am reading Frank O’Hara in bed. , I need to tell you.
He died in an accident, in 1966. How his words float over me. His favourite instrument,
saxophone. His favourite meal, lunch.

We can never own the decreated.
Because we can never possess them, they must be executed.
I need to experience this kind of utter devastation.

Jessica Lim (b. 1993) is a Pākehā, Chinese-Indonesian poet, scholar, archivist and prison abolitionist who is interested in literature as social practice. She holds a master’s in sociology with distinction from the University of Auckland. Her writing can be found in the anthology A Clear Dawn and literary journals Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Mimicry and Minarets.