This is the text of a performance reading I have given several times, the last being spring 2020 for the Biomixer, an online event conceived and hosted by Boryana Rossa. I am posting it now in 2024 as I approach presenting a version of the work Menopause Gym for Mad House, Helsinki.
The following text was really written to be read by me - to you, or whomever. For my voice to be the vector the writing, phrasing, cadence. Perhaps I’ll record it some time, but for now, here it is, for you to read. The footnotes have unformatted themselves. I’ll try to address that.
Alfred reading for Biomixer Zoom, 2020
Sigh
Unseamed
Unseeming
Unseemly
Pause
Pause again
Pause some more
I fear that I am going to be unseemly. Indelicate, indecorous, unbefitting That this seeming lack of composure is an undoing of sorts, certainly it feels that way, an undoing for some version of whoever might be before you
Sigh
I am going to sign again, not from loss of demeanor, but of queasiness, from trying to find breath, trying to locate a spell that will maintain what can appear like an all too delicate balance of pressures, of air, breath, and atmosphere.
Sigh
Introduction 2
Lily, the caretakers daughter, was literally rushed off her feet.
‘where was Lily? Where was her body?’
Performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan asked as she read the opening phrase from The Dead, a short story written by James Joyce in 1914. I was one in the participants of a three week summer school in the top floor studio of Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, June 1998. Peggy then asked us to write down lists of expressions that revealed the body in language, somatic hauntings in the idiomatic phrases.
By the skin of my teeth I have my eye on you I’ve got cold feet I paid an arm and a leg I’m all ears
I need to get it off my chest I’ll stick my neck out I’m head over heels They saw eye to eye
I’ll play it by ear It makes my blood boil
My lips are sealed
Over my dead body
Sweat Meteorology
Horses sweat
Men perspire
Women glow
I did not mind the arrival of the sudden night sweats that flashed like floods drenching me, despite their disruptive drama. Rather, I enjoyed their excessiveness and sense of abandon. I did not mind being sodden, somehow it was satisfying, intense and tropical.
Perhaps I found myself unbothered because I was used to sweating like a horse.
There was a moment some time prior to the onset of hormonal deluges when I announced that I ‘sweated like a man’ when I trained in martial arts. There was nothing restrained or glowing about my salty deluges. I poured unrelentingly, until sodden. My face went red. My hair all over the place. I precipitated, misted and formed clouds. At the end of each training session as we stood in line, ready to make our final OSS, we would pour. Sweat. Perspire. Glow. Forming a microclimate from our embraces and exertions. Humidities would ascend to the uncladded railway arch roof. Only to return to liquid state and pool on the mats as cold briny puddles.
In Seeing gender Kathy Acker wrote:
When I was a child, the only thing I wanted was to be a pirate. Because I wasn’t a stupid child, I knew that I couldn’t. I couldn’t send men down the plank, I couldn’t see sights stranger and more wonderful than those seen in my childhood dreams, I couldn’t dwell in seas that would freeze my lips and whose living and dead denizens would tear away my bones, I couldn’t swing from any yardarm. ‘Because,’ I announced, ’my parents won’t let me. ‘If only my parents were dead, I could do all that I wanted to do: I could run away to sea.’
I am 53, for the last several years now I have been exploring and writing about being Environmentally Menopausal
I have been thinking about how to reframe menopause and of how to become a pirate.
Menopause is turbulent, one needs sea legs that are study and can move in accordance with changing weather, fortunes and seas. One is literally out at sea, uncharted sea over which the normal starry constellations are absent. There are stars but they are arranged into hitherto unregonisabale orientations, the cardinal points have all shifted, perhaps the poles have moved to the equator and Lapland has come to me.
Menopause is a series of transitionary states, during which hormones soak, saturate and abate in exotic tides. Ones very self is up for grabs and there is no clear sense of anything. This pervasive non-sense is rich and strange ground in which things do not exactly grow but emerge.
In our endocrine altered environments, insides and outsides are subtly permeable. Phytohormones and animal hormones, biochemical molecules that are hormone like, that masquerade and alter, all travel across and through bodies of plants and animals in ecological relations as bodies are processes and processes are transformations of substances and things. Menopause is environmental. [1] Menopause is timely. It is about time
Sweat Protocol (i)
Be menopausal
Go to bed
Throw off covers
Sweat Protocol (ii)
Hold copper pipe closely in the heat of the day under the hot sun
Glisten
Sweat Protocol (iii)
version 1
Hold a cast iron kettle bell
Perform swings with it energetically
Sweat salt and water
Causing it to rust
Version 2
Hold a cast iron kettle bell
Perform swings energetically
Perspire clouds that precipitate
Causing it to rust
Sweat Protocol (iv)
Wear a white cotton mutated laboratory coat to the gym
Run and/or row into a heavy sweat
Use the coat to absorb the sweat
Bury the sweaty coat in a wild area in the hope that sympathetic microbes will grow with/on and from the sweat
I am trying to build muscle mass
Pause
I read somewhere that it is the best thing to do for a woman of my age
Pause
Rather than head down the road of a gender conforming regiment of hormone replacement therapy just yet, I am trying to manipulate and work with my own physiology and hormonal well being.
Pause
The coach does not appear to like me to refer to menopause
Pause
Or that I am menopausal
Pause
And, I am sure he entirely unintentionally, treats me as more frail and with less capacity then I have
Pause
I try to explain that skilful coaching of perimenopausal and menopausal women is an untapped market, ripe for the picking
Pause
That helping women architect muscle to support their wellbeing as they transition into, though and beyond menopause and its post is a terrific idea
Pause And, that we make testosterone, that our muscle mass is intimately enmeshed with the delicate production of that culturally affirmative, biologically determinate elixir of androgen prescribing sovereignty. Pause
I feel a little bit condescended to
Pause
But not enough to put me off
Pause
He wants me to Instagram my visits to the gym (or now my home work out sessions!)
Pause
I didn’t want to but perhaps if I hashtag menopause . . .
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I explain that I want to understand the muscular influence on metabolic operations and endocrine pathways and so calibrate my own hormonal profiles
Pause
The artist and physical trainer Cassils tells me about Diane Nyed The swimmer, who was only able to realise her self imposed challenge of swimming from Cuba to Florida to in her early sixties.
Pause
I read more about muscle mass and muscle loss, The regulation of muscle mass is of interest to a diverse group of people. There are those, such as power athletes and body builders, who are primarily interested in increasing their muscle mass. Others are concerned with preventing muscle loss. This is critical for the frail elderly, those with myopathies, cancer, sepsis, HIV/AIDS and other diseases, those suffering from reduced mobility as a result of injury, and astronauts. [2]
Pause
Astronaut
Pause
Pausalnaut
Pause
Astropause Pause Today I find a copy of ‘Getting Built’ For Women! (exclamation mark) A Bodybuilding programme for Beauty, Strength and. Fitness, by Dr Lynn Pirie, with - in much smaller writing, Bill Reynolds, 1984. In 1984 I was 17, I had been menstruating only for one year, menses having begun late due to a semi starved, body, one sculpted and carved by the conflicting resistances to and towards received femininities. The tinkering of body, food, expenditure, was an early bodily sculpture, an unintentional nod to Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972 by Eleanor Antin via the latter homage by Cassils in CUTS: A Traditional Sculpture, 2011 – 2013. A temporal mobius strip.
Pause
The artist Mary Maggic performs a kind of hormonal hack, they articulate themselves in terms of body and gender as continually shifting in response to environmental toxicities as they embrace unintentionalities and instabilities. They work with estrogen
Pause
DIY emancipation of estrogen using domestic and lay scientific protocols towards more participatory distributions of estragon. They asks ‘What is the feasibility of citizen science-based approach to synthesizing hormones? How can the recontextualization of laboratory biochemistry to an open source recipe outline the esoteric procedures and knowledge that are required to carry out such a process?*
Pause
They have run workshops in estrogen detection
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Enquiring of the pervasiveness of estro-centricy
Pause
For estrogenicity is no longer limited to a small group of substances, but can be found in a whole series of chemical classes used daily in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, health, etc. Since the end of World War 2, more than 10,000 active substances capable of estrogen activity have been released on the market and used (in hydraulic or dielectric fluids for capacitors and transformers, glues, paints, detergents, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, cosmetics, etc).[3]
Pause
“We will ask multiple questions,” says Mary Maggic. “For example: Can we make our own hormones for contraception? What are the ethical implications in self-administering DIY hormones? How to detect the presence of hormones in the environment? How to design sensors that will play a role in citizen analysis of local water? Can we eliminate hormonal toxicity from the environment?”[4]
Pause
Eva Hayward describes the open potentials of the endochrine landscape created by our medications and industrial common materials, one in which our shared evolutionary history with other animals creates a common vulnerability to the effects of environments. She says: Hormone levels change over an individual's lifetime and are affected by lifestyle (stress, physical activity), and exogenous hormones (Roberts 2007). Even natural plant substances like phytoestrogens interact with endocrine systems of various animals (Adlercreutz 2002). Our material culture—as expressed by what objects we encircle ourselves with, the food we eat, the water we drink.
Pause
Haywards invokes Bailey Kier’s perspective on in which he attends to the ecologically constitutive nature of bodies: he refers to “bodies” as constant processes, relations, adaptations, and metabolisms, engaged in varying degrees of re/productive and economic relations with multiple other “‘bodies’, substances and things” (Kier 2010).
Pause
Astro-pause
Digging into the tinkering of muscle, it’s metabolic and hormonal sensitivities
Pause
I lift
Pause
I breathe
Pause
Other processes are at play at other scales; microbial, biochemical.
Human bodies exert, sweat, steam and drip, microbes proliferate on bodies and on surfaces, finding nourishing niches in which to metabolise and expand.
Weights rust, sweat clouds precipitate, seemingly immovable materials oxidise and react.
Embedded in each of our ‘human’ cells symbiogeneitic mitochondria - mosaic organelles of bacterial provenance from an origin evolutionary ‘Eve’ – metabolise;
muscles fibres fire and twitch in various tempos (slooow, fast, intermediate), satellite stem cells are signalled, differentiate, line up in multinuclear myotubes, fibres are formed and muscle is laid. Pause Muscle Culture
Between 2008 and 2010 I spent a lot of time in a laboratory in the University of Birmingham, I was there to research and experiment with growing muscle cells on spider silk. I worked with murine skeletal muscle cell lines and primary cell cultures, I learnt to observer and note their differentiation pathways, their miniscule architecting as satellite cells received signals to differentiate and form the multi nuclei myotubes that then compose muscle fibres.
I learnt how to cultivate the cells, prodding them, nudging them in their tissue culture flasks and 98 and well plates, tiny muscular entities, occulted and excluded from anybody.
Sometimes we would visit the animal facility where nonhuman animals are bred, housed and culled for research. A number of mice, specially bed, normally dystrophic, would be killed or scarified as quickly and efficiently as possibly – I think humanely is the word, before tiny biopsies were extracted for cultivation. The lab was concerned with the tragic, degenerative effects Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and with how to address this in human patients. It explored the molecular mechanisms of muscular dystrophy, and investigating the genetics, hormones and other cell signallers that created its disruption of the differentiation lineages. The anarchic rationale that created exquisite looking muscle cultures, spindle like webs, clumps and masses that refused the lineal logic of myotube construction.
Cell cultivation and the many methods of enquiry take routine care and precision, regularity, observation, adjustment.
The research group was small and included one PhD student, Dean. Dean was a former body builder who still trained. Each day he consumed, from a series of Tupperware containers, with unassuming regularity chicken and rice, and protein drinks. Building and maintaining his muscle mass, architecting muscle on the gross scale whilst working on the delicate molecular biologic irrational of dystrophic muscle. of I could never establish if there was a connection for him between his muscle research work on the micro, and his muscle cultivation on the macro, however steadfast regularity was evident in both.
The senior researcher, Janet, would show me how to peer at cells, how to sense their condition, how to be delicate and precise. In the dim tissue culture lab, amidst the pink flasks of muscle she would tell me about long journeys she made by cross country skiing.
Kathy Acker counts.
In her essay Language of the Body Kathy Acker writes: I want to shock my body into growth; I do not want to hurt it.
. . . I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions; I count seconds between repetitions; I count tie, seconds or minutes, between sets: From the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity I just continually count.
I put on Robert Ashley’s 24 minute track The Backyard from his exquisite seven-part opera for Television made between 1978 and 1983.
My mind turns to my breath 1
Pause
My mind watches my breath 2
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My mind turns and watches my breath 3
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My mind turns and faces my breath 4
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My mind faces my breath 5
Pause
My mind studies my breath 6
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My mind sees every aspect of the beauty of my breath 7
Pause
My mind watches my breath soothing itself 8
Pause
My mind sees every part of my breath 9
Pause
My breath is no indifferent to itself 10
She never thinks of possibility or of how probably it is that they have come together
Those thoughts never enter her mind
Nor do thoughts of sports
She has no desire to improve her muscles
For her piano playing it the only mystery.
Updated Alfred, April 2020
[1]An excerpt from ‘Unlikely Conspiracies of Biologic Thought’, a chapter I contributed to
Naturally Postnatural, Catalyst Jennifer Willet, 2017.
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2439518/
[3] http://www.makery.info/en/2016/05/18/loeuf-la-poule-et-les-hormones-diy/
[4] http://www.makery.info/en/2016/05/18/loeuf-la-poule-et-les-hormones-diy/