purgation

Maybe it was something I needed to write for myself, a quiet purgation that I’d keep in the cold, dark storage of my laptop’s hard drive forever.

The experience was extraordinarily grueling — a stripping and peeling feeling, with each regimen creating a feeling of purgation, followed by temporary relief, followed by doing it all over again.

A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.

First, the attempt to use racial-education programs to construct a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans of European ancestry think of themselves as defined by a toxic “whiteness” will lead to its purgation.

Subsequent audio files then move you from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and back, exploring alimentation, purgation and other mundane aspects of the day-to-day.