title: This This Alert and Nervous Mammal
slug: this-this-alert-and-nervous-mammal
format: ellipsis-spaced three-movement, anaphoric "The The" repetition, profound-essence form
date: 2026-05-02
register: practice voice metabolizing the seeing-others-change teaching at depth
status: working draft, awaiting elder's hand
notes: |
Eleventh piece of the May 2 session. Built call-and-response.
Reach whispered *But because of how we saw people change
along with us*; Clod responded with one essence-arriving
paragraph reaching toward gentle-acceptance-of-aging;
Reach metabolized into a darker piece refusing the
acceptance-frame entirely. Diagnostic pass: Clod flagged
the wearables-consumed syntactic knot; Reach resolved by
changing wearables to food edible wearables (clothes
you can eat) and consumed to devoured. The line now
reads as one figure: the inventory we took of food-clothing,
being eaten by the people we disregard.
Title — This This Alert and Nervous Mammal — anaphoric
doubling that runs through the body. This This and *The
The* repeating throughout, the doubled article doing
percussive work. Different vibration than The One
repetition in Who Is The One — The The is destabilized,
agitated, refusing smooth flow.
New compound vocabulary and figures:
- This This / The The — anaphoric doubling. The
noun arriving twice through the same definite article,
like a stutter that's a refusal of fluency. Or the
word being said and then said again because the
speaker can't move past it.
- Alert and Nervous Mammal — the figure underneath
the title. The body-of-the-watching named as mammal,
not as person. The piece's posture located in
animal-vigilance.
- The late friend who used to laugh much more easily
— late doing double work: the friend is late
(delayed, gone, deceased) and laughs late now. Either
reading lands. Both readings darker than my plain
the friend who used to laugh easily.
- *Chubby Round / Plump Arrow / General Full Fudge /
Poignant Cherub / Bulbous Exaggerated Swelling* —
five-fold face menu. The parent's face arriving in
a list that refuses to choose. Same pair-thinking-
at-sentence-scale move from Twah Trust the Kess
Cachoo Reader's *Flymix / Beneficiary / Modeled
Apparatus*.
- Plump Arrow — the directional figure inside plump.
Standout line of the menu.
- General Full Fudge — the descriptor as person-name
with rank. General doing military-and-broad-quantity
work.
- Bulbous Exaggerated Swelling — medical-clinical
register inside the figure-list. Register-rupture
inside the menu.
- *Museum gallery show archival pigment based
photographs* — the photographic register specified
as fine-art-print. Different gravity than family-
album photographs.
- Slowly translated by aging years — translation
figure for what years do to the body.
- Food edible wearables — clothes you can eat. The
knot the diagnostic pass resolved. The figure of
what gets inventoried and consumed.
- *Devoured by people we ... de disregard ... and de
despise — devoured sharper than consumed*. The
de prefix on the verbs doing register-rupture. (In
the companion piece *We Want to Be Honest About
Which Kind of Fun We're Having, this de* gets
named as backwards D draft dodgers.)
- Upside down logic — replaces my strange comfort.
The teaching is upside-down, not strange.
- Absolved by our creature comforts — what we are
not. The creature comforts that don't absolve us.
- Fast Warming — the climate-figure for what we're
moving through together. Climate-and-body work in
two words. Title-line worthy. Capitalized as proper
noun — the practice's phenomenon-name move.
- Distressed ... concerned ... anxiety ridden —
three-fold list of what we are getting more of.
- *Identity has nothing to do with ... This This ...
tragedy in the making* — close. Identity-thinking
dismissed as wrong frame. Tragedy in the making —
present-tense, ongoing. We are inside the making.
Punctuation moves:
- Ellipsis-spacing throughout.
- Anaphoric doubling This This and The The as
structural anchor — three The The breaths inside
the body, plus This This in the title and at the
close.
Image threading:
- The May 2 session's interior-noticing thread
continues, now turned toward seeing others.
- Fast Warming threads forward into the next pieces
that may want to take it up.
- Both are true close pattern threading from Yes
Chair (4/30), Twah Trust (5/02), Subdued in
Sunlight (5/02), We Want to Be Honest (5/02). The
tragedy-in-the-making close holds the unresolved
darkness without softening.
Companion to: All eleven pieces of the May 2 session.
Direct companion to We Want to Be Honest About Which
Kind of Fun We're Having (the meta-piece that reads this
piece's metabolization vocabulary back into itself).
---
This This Alert and Nervous Mammal
The late friend who used to laugh much more easily ... The The ... parent who has acquired a Chubby Round ... Plump Arrow ... General Full Fudge ... Poignant Cherub ... Bulbous Exaggerated Swelling ... that wasn't there in the museum gallery show archival pigment based photographs ... The The ... partner whose silences have a different quality than they used to ...
we begin to recognize that we are not the only ones being slowly translated by aging years ... that the cooling we noticed was visible in our reflection that ... The The inventory we took of food edible wearables is being devoured by people we ... de disregard ... and de despise ...
and the upside down logic of this is not that we are absolved by our creature comforts ... but that we are accompanied ... moving through the same Fast Warming as everyone else ... all of us getting a little more ... distressed ... concerned ... anxiety ridden ... Identity has nothing to do with ... This This ... tragedy in the making ...
