13/8/2025
DJCS

The heart has been stopping for years. Emergency rooms record the absence. Repetition. Sight goes first, then hearing, then legs. They test. They keep testing. Wires, stickers, jelly on the chest, the silence of “nothing found.” A neurologist asks what I do. I say art sector. The diagnosis is a pill. Small, white. Might help, they say. You might enjoy the weight loss. The pharmacist passes it to me with an A4 of warnings:

SUICIDAL THOUGHTS
BLURRED VISION, EYE PAIN
CONFUSION, LOSS OF CO-ORDINATION/WALKING OR HANDWRITING PROBLEMS, MEMORY PROBLEMS, TROUBLE CONCENTRATING
MOOD CHANGES, NERVOUSNESS
TINGLING OR NUMBNESS, TREMOR
LOWER BACK PAIN, PINK/RED/BROWN PEE (MAY BE KIDNEY STONE)
DIZZINESS, DROWSINESS, SLOW OR SLURRED SPEECH
FLUSHING
TIREDNESS OR WEAKNESS
DRY MOUTH OR THROAT, CHANGES IN TASTE, LOSS OF APPETITE, WEIGHT LOSS
STOMACH UPSET

It is a lobotomy for the century, administered through swallowing. No mental health check. No hesitation. The economics are easy:

KILL THE PATIENT CURE THE PROBLEM

The pill will sandpaper the tongue, bleach the memory, blunt the will. The bureaucratic solution to dissent.

To forget.
To dissolve.
To disappear.

It has never been more important to remember. Because memory is what resists when the machinery turns. Israel continues to murder Palestinians, burn the archives, shoot the journalists, flatten the libraries. To forget is to join the project of the killer. Here in Aotearoa, the banning of te reo Māori in children’s books is a direct assault on Māori sovereignty, a slow suffocation, a theft of words before they can root in the mouth. Even the streets conspire in this project, named after American states in new suburbs as they were once named for British governors and colonisers. A cartography of allegiance that overwrites what was here with the language of those who come to take it. This is the same grammar of ownership spoken in different empires’ accents, a declaration that the land belongs to someone else, somewhere else, and that those here must learn to live in the shadow of another flag.

I write this after collapsing at work. The heart stops. The disability benefit will not cover my rent. The arithmetic of this empire is deliberate. To make living impossible, to let the body fall into the gap between submission and survival. We keep the truth alive by speaking it, writing it, by rejecting prescribed death. BUT I look around and see the walls lined with work paid for by the same people dishing out the small, white pill. Is this art truth, or a truth that can be invoiced for. A politics determined by funding metrics, health and safety compliance, staff capacity.

The condition is contagious. The body becomes the sector. The heart fails. The vision goes, then the hearing, then the legs. The system glitches, and for a few moments in the warm darkness, in the metallic ring of the tinnitus, in the oblivion of the flesh, is something that could be discerned as truth.