Hi _______________,

I hope you’re having a nice week.
I’ve been trying to untangle a lot of thoughts, and am curious to hear your response.

When I woke up this morning my hands and arms felt heavy. My palms were buzzing and the skin on the tips of my fingers was more sensitive than it had been before. It was like I was touching things for the first time, like the vibrations from the jackhammer had anchored themselves within me and were trying to escape every time I picked up a pen, or turned a doorknob, or held a cup. Vibrations were transferred into each object I touched, stored momentarily until an/other moved across its surface, picking up a slight residual hum as they passed.

During the jackhammering yesterday I felt tremors transmitted through the concrete under my feet. As the slab was removed – creating a pile of rubble on the grass – a damp mouldy smell was released from the dirt, coming into contact with air for the first time in decades. We breathed it in, inhaling a moment that had dissipated by the time I returned later on. Our bodies became conduits, registering an unearthing, an unsettling, a warning signal, a transformative confusion.

Now, as I write this, my hands are beginning to lose their tenderness. They’re getting used to their new skin. The transition from blister to callus turns a soft membrane into a hardened shell. A kind of shedding – like moulting an exoskeleton – where yesterday’s experience of ripping up concrete sparked a metamorphosis that I’m still grappling with.

Whenever I write to you I seem to get stuck between metaphor and reality.

Each time a termite moults (3-4 times), they are promoted to a new social class. Nymphs moult into workers, then some workers moult into soldiers or alates. Workers become alates only by moulting into alate nymphs. And somewhere along the line, a couple become queens (one primary, one secondary).[1] A literal shedding of skin sparks an altered identity.[2]

Over lunch I pulled a copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis off Carolyn’s bookshelf and started re-reading it.[3]

In the churning mass between unbuilding and rebuilding, small corridors of dust were discovered running throughout the beams inside the walls of her house. The untreated timber of a backyard job attracted termites, who climbed out of the earth and ate the internal studs. The structure was weakened, the roof began to leak, and a demolition was planned. I was wondering where the house went after it was eaten. I had this image in my head of the termites eating the timber, travelling with the house in their guts, and redistributing it elsewhere when they shit. A slow spreading out of the house in multiple, invisible directions. Actually though, it’s way more straightforward than that. The bits of dust that are caught in the beams have been eaten and pooed out into the same tunnels they create. So they’re filling in the holes as they make them, slowly replacing the house with their shit.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

A couple of months ago, this story passed through a few people before reaching me. We sat around the dining room table one night, its worn pine top propping up snacks and drinks. I fidgeted with a corn chip as C relayed an encounter from the previous week. The logistics of tearing down a building to make space for a new one involves a misshapen network of activity, as different workers, with different skills, move in and out of the house. A few days earlier, the builder and the pest exterminator had met over a beer, sitting at the same table we sat across now. What started as a discussion around the pragmatics of accessing and sterilising termites (through a newly cut trapdoor in the kitchen floorboards), evolved into a cathartic exchange of experience; a shared porosity. ‘Then presumably to grasp – in a flash of primordial insight – their own respective roles,’[4] the two men began to cry. They mirrored one another with glassy eyes. Tears pooled, as their bodies became temporarily liquid, wrapped in a thin skin and an empathetic response – I see you cry and my own eyes get wet.

I turned this meeting over and over. With each retelling, the men became increasingly supple, until their bodies resembled pillowy lumps of pale flesh, discharging constant streams of saltwater from the corners of their eyes. Brought together by the house’s dismantling, the criers absorbed decades of sensations, stored in the walls, and the ceiling, and the floor. The outpouring of emotion was too much to digest. Overcome, the two workers peeled back their skins, replacing themselves with two termite queens, sitting opposite one another at the wooden table.

But without the gift of tear ducts, the termites are unable to cry. Instead, the pair eats away at the myth of a solitary queen. Planted in the dark, the monarchs are immobile, laying eggs and ingesting the accumulative residue of feelings hidden away, delivered to them by workers. Growing, growing, growing. The two queens – primary/secondary – are discontinuous from the rest of the colony, in some ways out of sync. They spend their lives temporally untethered from everyone they know, living fifty times as long as the workers, the alates, the soldiers.[5] Rather than the spreading activity for which termites are known, emotional deposits extracted from the house are centralised, stored and conflated in the queens’ guts, processed by their tiny bodies over time.

I imagined the table being eaten out from under us – the timber surface turning into a pile of dust at our feet.

I imagined that dust from the table getting picked up by a draught – the kind that slams a door shut – and blowing into my eyes. I imagined my eyes watering in response, like they did when particles of concrete filled the air during the jackhammering yesterday. And I imagined allowing myself to be moved by the breakdown of the wooden table, and the release of emotional dregs trapped within each grain.

‘I couldn’t stop the tears.’[6]

They ran down my cheeks, as I resisted the temptation to wipe them away. I sat there, sobbing, becoming gradually snottier. Overwhelmed by a sudden flood of sadness, frustration, and a disjointed empathy, the tears had nowhere to go. I tilted my head back, so that the water falling from my eyes collected in two little puddles on my face. In the way that birds flock to waterholes after decades of dry, my crying called out to the house to respond.

A pair of formless bodies emerged from the dust. The queens were thirsty, dehydrated from the slow dismantling of the house, and the flushing out of feelings.[7] They settled on my cheeks and began gently sipping the salty water that had accumulated. We shared in a moment of exchange, an emotional othering through crying and drinking, where past encounters stored in the wood flowed through me to be ingested by the two queens.

I had a thought that I’d wrap up this letter in a neat package for you, that I’d tie up my loose ends. The more I write, the more impossible that seems to be. The house has been ripped open and everything is gushing out, reordering itself as it goes.

This is all I have for now. More soon.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
tx

[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Termite," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Termite&oldid=884014829 (accessed March 18, 2019).
[2] ‘How many selves is a person awarded in a lifetime? Can you shed one for another, like skins?’ Sheila Ballantyne Norma Jean the Termite Queen (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975), 14.
[3] Becoming-bug… wondering if we’re becoming termite? Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis. translated by Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.), 3.
[4] Ballantyne Norma Jean the Termite Queen, 15.
[5] The average termite lives for about 1 year. Queens live up to 50. I lived 4,000 years or more.
[6] Ballantyne Norma Jean the Termite Queen, 15.
[7] Although they can’t cry themselves, some insects are drawn to drink the tears of others. It’s called lachryphagy. Wikipedia contributors, "Mud-puddling," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mud-puddling&oldid=887129232 (accessed March 18, 2019).

Then presumably to grasp was developed alongside works by Carolyn Craig, Lyn Heazlewood and Kat Sawyer, as part of Loftus St Projects. We came together around the slow degradation, ongoing digestion, and imminent demolition of 19 Loftus St, Dulwich Hill, to explore the inter-personal, inter-species, and inter-material relationships absorbed in the unbuilding and rebuilding of the suburban house.