this is just a study of a feeling that i don't think people get to express enough or have witnessed by other people, so i went for a walk and recorded it and it's fucking hard

a recording of me walking through a cemetery and screaming.

psa: i’m all right, honestly, there’s no need to worry. i’d been carrying the urge around for days, a tightness beneath the ribs, and now that it’s had some air i feel, if not exactly lighter, then at least less followed by it. it came to me in that in-between place, somewhere along the seam of sleep and waking. i haven’t been sleeping properly, so the idea didn’t so much arrive as insist: it had to last eight minutes, and the voice had to break. not gently, but properly. holding a scream like that shows you how much feeling the body stores. the throat becomes more than a throat; it carries grief, memory, fear, and a strange, almost holy kind of exhaustion. i’m grateful i did it—grateful, even, to the dream that told me how long it should be—though, in the middle of it, there was a flicker of real fear in seeing it through.

i like making these videos. i would watch this with your headphones at a suitable volume for loud screams throughout. i guess i’m learning something at the moment through the expression of these emotions and words, that they need voice, or emotions just need sound, so here is the sound of me feeling something really guttural. i keep thinking about what it would be like to just scream at a reading or something and to be fully understood, if that’s even possible.

i’ve been taking the bus to different parts of the city every night this week, or grabbing a bike from the street and riding in the rain, to places i have never been, each and every night, really late, and when i get to these new places sometimes there are only a few establishments open, and so i go inside, grab a cheap late night espresso and i sit with my notebook, i write about being a sculpture, a monument, and the little sculptures i have in my room, such as the ‘gum on the soap box’ sculpture i currently have festering on my desk, of every single piece of gum i have bitten into this week, (picture below, the one in my mouth right now will go there soon), and it’s helped me recently realise that this is all we are right; a collection of the fragments we collect and make and that’s the sculpture, not some refined and carved in stone fucking polished marble beauty, but all the fucking discarded little bits you have around you, and the boundaries you erect or don’t to savour yourself from scrutiny or not, and how far someone can slip into or out of those, and i think a part of being an artist is playing and constructing and orchestrating those fragments into a dialogue with one another, which is where these videos come in. i’m nothing but the sum of me my gum my screams and i can’t see myself fully if i don’t stop to let the totality of each expression breathe.

tbh also been kinda angry lately.

xo

pea

WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

FOLLOW for more at @pierceeldridge or @sissyanarchy