Along with what looked like the contents of our house, I packed an idea on our family holiday to Cornwall. Less idea actually and more of a seed of something, or a need. A need to transfigure difficult feelings into words I can see, and to know more in the process. For expression, and release, and understanding. My own therapeutic writing that, as with all such, is inherently creative. Any attempt at meaning-making is. So I took the idea/seed/need away with me. I took it for walks, swam with it, rested with it, wrestled with it, moved with it. Noting down thoughts urgently lest they evaporate as they’ve a tendency to do. Then I brought the growing thing back along the endless road home and typed it up, paying daily visits to its digital form to reencounter and reshape it.

And this piece is not finished. It just keeps going and changing as this world does, rapidly, breathlessly. And is a thing ever truly finished anyway? It’s a piece about colonialism, othering, about what some are witness to and others are subject to. So here it is, with my need for it now to be outside of me, so I can keep moving with other words about this and about everything else. There’s so much to say. If you read this, I would love to hear how it arrives with you. It’s been a few months since I was here on Substack, and it’s really a heartening place to return.

Outside, In

We were never meant to see

We were never supposed to know

The inside

The insides

Spilling (thrilling) out

Inside out, inside gone, outside in.

Ungiven intimacy.

But now the inside is out, and in plain sight

Exposé

And still we grasp and manipulate and contort, to keep from inside knowledge.

To wrench the gaze away.

And when it’s out, we know: what was once inside them, there, is still inside us, here. As certain as one’s shadow. This is bystander horror. Recognition of the worst of the possible from inside (within and among) us. And then looking away.

Dismembering

Disremembering

The violence of unremembering

The walls that held the innards of a home blasted away. The contents, the life within the home within the walls, scattered and pulverised. Outsided into everywhere dust. Unprivated, an over and over again demolition of the heart.

The estrangement of this ungiven intimacy. The depersonalisation, the humiliation of being bloodied, the othering of it. A show of organ or bone, or else what is shown is absence. The outsiding leaves gap of limb or skull. Blood like raw material, like resource.

Extracted. Expended. Forgotten.

The colonial suck and drag, the drill and spill, unearthing, ungrounding. The outsiding, the elsewhering of the land.

Extraction, extraction, until all is laid bare, and taken elsewhere. For insider people who get to stay, and stay whole, woefully intact. For people who get to stay human?

No.

No one keeps their humanity intact this way. It leaks.

Who is it that merits being audience to this spectacle, this grotesque, flayed outsiding?

Who merits being subject?

Subject, object. Shift.

There is design in the chaos of outsiding. There is intent.

Imagine the insides of a celebrity on display, a leader, a royal? For all to see. Imagine just the clinical intimacy of their X-ray, only blur and bone. Impossible. Privacy and dignity are bought and sold.

You see, the insides of certain bodies are just less valuable, so easily are they spilled and spent.

Outsiding is for outsiders.

And outsiding is a violent act,

forcing what’s inside

- the body, the mind, the land -

out.

Do you notice

that we hold our phones a mother’s embrace away?

Do you know

that the proximity of a mother’s arms is nature-perfect for the infant’s developing vision? To make clear of the face of the beloved. For each to gaze endlessly upon the other? Yes, to behold the beloved.

We pick up our phones and we gaze upon them. We are titilated, horrified, entertained, outraged, soothed by this warm, clammy thing in the palm of our hand. And we put them down again. The whole world of another is putdownable.

The effort to bury children whole (or to see that they are buried at all)

Bound, tender-so, inside white cloth

A small body brutally unbound, scattered, to be lovingly bound again, in loss

To be held once more, and held together

The effort to return the outside in, to restore sanctity and dignity

To cover and shield and keep.

A swaddling beyond life.

Such ungiven intimacy

Restoring wholeness of the beloved.

Outside, In.

We must each be to the other beloved.