To the Rest of It,
Poet, essayist, and editor Cat Chong playfully untangles capitalist language and legacies of rest from 'the gardens of rest's enemy'
To the Rest of It,
How are you?
In the gardens of rest’s enemy where pain is a verb, with slackened pace the snails crept along in search through flooded combinations of frosted glass line displacements and motion ripples. For the body has taken over my consciousness and wealthier stones of private ownership occupy my voice.
A market will say anything now. yes. mass lay downs. yes. extractive abandonment. yes. indigence by a matter of degrees in new and unexpected geometries fuse gluten and constant need for rent somewhere close to the people we love the unpaid work we do the waged labour we apply for. we are beside ourselves. in this paroxysmal hythe of gentrification convenes the bulging assemblies of our algorithms artificial intelligence and the digested trepanation of critical literatures.
On the 24th of January 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh computer with the slogan "A Computer for the Rest of Us" in the primeval feelings of our most eviscerating technologies we already know the rest. it materialises before our eyes a hatred of real things in small purpose
to put it in our veins we are compelled to smoke it
keep the rest a temporary exfoliation of capitalist demands of endless production.
We look at the walls read in leagues of etymological distance a mile after which to cease stare or stand in what remains is left over leant on the sum remaining to be paid to the corporate vapours by which we subsist for the administration of our scarcity now. decry desist depose to rest and not surrender as with this horrific quantity of coercion and the carapace of the state
in 1991 Ford’s pick-up trucks declare The Best Never Rest advertising later fragments as euphemisms for gun running imperial war the entrenchment of police reality.
How can I say what we are experiencing?
the cold homicidal repulsion of our corporatocratic state
I’m not alluding to sleep though I’m familiar with its prestige honey
hurry up it’s time to suffer
at the conjunction of escapism dreams of detachment a pause of clouds passing through a window
I can’t talk about it as in the residue as in frozen chemicals contrapuntal eternity holds
the rest pours out my body I have to learn to put myself to sleep under the paracetamoon outside the intimate wilderness of my phone.
In 1888 George Eastman coined the advertising slogan "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest". founded The Eastman Kodak Company, patented nitrocellulose film for Kodak to build a photographic school in Rochester, New York to train pilots for aerial reconnaissance during World War I. their feeling of having been refreshed or restored. purchase a hardwood distillation plant in Tennessee to be the Eastman Chemical Company in 1920. paint stripper of thought in the queue of government death machines the varicose train leaves now. when they enter the Second World War Kodak obeys the American War Production Board produces film, cameras, microfilm, pontoons, synthetic fibres, RDX, variable-time fuses, and hand grenades made to feel like baseballs. its European subsidiaries manufacture film, fuses, triggers, detonators, etc through slave labour in Stuttgart and Berlin as Kodak continues to import goods to the United States purchased from Nazi Germany. the names of hypnotic evidence these cities and Fano planes as if the snare might name itself. you press we do the rest. in 1943 Kodak scientists join the Manhattan Project enrich Uranium-235. are later contracted to create emulsions for radiation tests for fallout from nuclear tests and participate in clandestine projects during the Cold War. announce in 2020 the mass production of pharmaceutical materials "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" these are the cardinal laws of excoriation like the humming drones punched through the flatness of our hard phones around the clock three dots I rest my case in the foment of state profit and surplus extortion
in the gardens of rest’s enemy are the denotation of distance units we cannot get away past the participle of forms that don’t show syncopations of vowels ending the Middle English raising of ĕ to ĭ before a dental consonant in the formal hereafter. I wonder often if we, inside the poem could a) name the rest of it as in the residing moments for upheaval as in the disruption dissent protest and sedition for the sabotage of the borders of our division b) wrest our common and collective survival from racial capital and bio-logics of the state and c) embed in the resonance of the word a material analysis of our material conditions as the surplus class like boiling water across frosted glass a thermal shock to the systems of reproach
in the gardens of rest’s enemy a group of jawless fish breathe like blood soaked bread in the autocue of capital concentration and attestations of the law. since yesterday they have calculated our throats for the absolution of their arms. sales consumed like syntax and clots of water when they say “we” the inhabitants of percentages and average calculations of escalating production our rest lies here we are in pain it destroys private property we cannot trust what we earn they say “we” for a deserving dead the human resource for credit as far as the eye can see in the gardens of rest’s enemy their souls wet themselves with money and we are swirling swirling
sometimes the door is open and I am terrified I am awake betraying the exact coordinates of my harmony with our subterfuge its resistance I’m frightened their enthusiasm for our death is spectacular declarations in the halls of provision and providence the red and murderous blue of the bleached lampreys from on high
rest assured love I know we’ll struggle
from the buttons and slogans of extraction and intent. title. of the dirt we pitch into. name. the horizon we know most familiar with the sun. date of birth. always. gender. oh fuck it. ethnicity. like the mixed spectrum of the sky. first spoken language. they have gouged out our songs. small towns and countries of birth. next time they squeeze. we’ll refuse their deterrent empires in this world we love. address the executioners at dawn whisper no escape lie to the metrics of neoliberal circuitry
I will wrest me here
in the gardens of rest’s enemy
I will lie my way to sleep
With all my heart,
Cat.
12th December 2024
[Images 1-5 show the original, typed letter, which Cat later transcribed and is reproduced above.]
Cat Chong (they/them) is a poet, essayist, and publisher who, after attaining their BA and MA at Royal Holloway, University of London, completed their PhD in medical humanities at NTU, Singapore as a Nanyang President’s Graduate Scholar, where their work considered the intersections between gender, genre, and disability in contemporary experimental poetics. Their publications include Plain Air: An Apology in Transit (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), dis/content: An Archive of These Dreamings (dis/content, 2021), 712 stanza homes for the sun (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), and Dear Lettera 32 (Permeable Barrier, 2024). Their work has been published and exhibited internationally, appearing in publications such as Bloodaxe Books, Ethos Books, Ache Magazine, Bad Betty Press, Footnote Press, and Singapore Unbound. Their work has also been featured at festivals such as the Ledbury Poetry Festival, Singapore Writer’s Festival, Runnymede International Literary Festival, and Red Bean Poetry Festival. They are a co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective, the digital editor at Osmosis Press, and an assistant editor at Pamenar Press. They also work in London as a cheesemonger.
Instagram: @marbledmayhem
Linktree: Read Cat’s latest work here
This post is part of the Substack series, ‘On Rest’. Each of the disabled and chronically ill creatives featured receives a remuneration of £50 (made possible by an Edge Fund grant).
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bravo