Analysis of Emma Ramey's "I can no longer think"

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In Emma Ramey’s “I can no longer think,” I think Ramey was trying to convey a certain portrait of thoughtlessness that is characterized by a stumbling, blurry world of colors and sounds grasping at the words to describe the swirling of things. Each word is a wall which hinders the expression of true feeling, and then; each word is a tunnel that leads to more ambiguity, as well. This is signaled by the absence of traditional punctuation to create long stanzas or sentences with varied repetitions of the same phrases. These phrases sound like personal thoughts, rather than something one would write – phrases such as “with a pile of shoes and good god!” or “I mean my closet and yes this is meant to be sexual” would make the grammar Nazi with the elbow pads and red pen rather curious. When Ramey reiterates a thought, a “wall” becomes a “tunnel,” “universe” becomes a “closet,” “birth canal” becomes “Panama canal;” each of the thoughts extends or contracts and the line between comparison and contrast is softly smudged. The effect is that the usual space between the personal and the outer worlds is blurred, which is also illustrated by the visuals throughout of a blurred, modern world.

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A traditional approach to this piece wouldn’t be nearly as successful because what the piece actually describes is nonlinear, having no beginning and no ending. I have had this playing on my screen for the past hour and it hasn’t ended. I have kept it open this whole time because I want to know if it has an ending at all – thus far, I do not think there is an ending in sight. If one cannot clear one’s own mind, one cannot reach a conclusion (or perhaps it is better to say that one cannot reach a conclusion beyond the fact that they are unable to reach a conclusion). Thus, there is no conclusion, and this would be an impossible effect in an unanimated form.

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I think the female subjectivity in the piece makes it more immediately relatable to women. Furthermore, the feelings conjured by “wall” (obstacles), “tunnel” (darkness), and “mother’s shawl” (warmth/comfort) create an uncomfortable dynamic between feelings of safety and vulnerability, which felt to me like it might signify sexual violence, especially given the recurring phrase of “that spring break no one likes to talk about.” From this perspective, the “thoughtlessness” experienced could be the kind of thoughtless produced by terror.

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In my own work, what I would like to hold onto is the fluidity of this piece. The phrases used fit into each other in different, unpredictable combinations that never end. It is truly shape shifting: the center is nowhere and the circumference is everywhere. I became very curious about the blurring of the letters at the outer ends of a string of text, and so I began keeping a running list of the words that were bolder in each fragment in hopes that it would produce a sub-narrative that told me something more. Instead, I just got a page of notes that looks like: “the universe created at my mother of shoes and good god! trip down the my mother’s and yes this.” So, I never found the secret story I was looking for, but I still liked trying to find it. I would like to stow away this idea for future projects; both the idea of creating a sub-narrative through the display of text, but also of creating false possibilities of such narratives. In retrospect, I think the edges were blurred to create a shape, or state of things, that doesn’t have defined edges.

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