to the nursemaid who has loosened knots, burned through blocked passageways; musicated the very milk of my organs. what old rot having died off completely can come back dressed in sumptuous disguise? my very dangerous limb, where the soul cuts clean the mind sticks; there in its quilt of checks and balances, its illusions - imagining the imaginary - my limb awakening, like a phantom.
what better defense against the death instinct than the false self? shelter the symptom, sabotage my well-being in order to maintain the jouissance of anxiety! i was a disciple of dead thinking, icing the wound of a lost limb. the fable i wore on my body neatly eclipsed the larger myth, the myth of my singularity. it was my spectacle, it was me, confronted with all the pressure to conform to this notion of an embodied, higher social unit.
the imaginary - she is constantly sewing back and forth, tumbling over lines of motion in reverse, building thick ridges, she is always in exultant, intimate revolt. to what service would i direct her? to what height would i let her sublimations reign? she is the damaging of any single meaning. she will rush lengthwise along my nervous system until the signifiers begin to sing on their own.
she is the subject-in-process/on trial, stirring, sweating, singing; giver of a new gift, of parousia, love as a non-reciprocal, disequilibrium. if i clear her the room, she will provide nourishment that is never fixed, a line that will run through the body fashioning a lightscape, source becoming source, low and sweet, floral, rapturous. that feeling of serene mastery few physical things in this world have the power to produce. perhaps the sea? art as a secret exercise rivaling the wide blue sea and its way of extinguishing my thoughts so perfectly, so sublimely.
i constructed a purer fantasy; my mystical solution baring strange resemblance to the bitter root of my original malady. there had to be another way, a thorn pushed into my side in just the right place? you, my love, my shackle, my sticky leash,
whose terrible blood hit my skin and clung, shining like a diamond. you - beastly, bloody, unyielding, driving to the very highest pitches of happiness. a reminder of the animal world calling from outside my calculated solitude. were as all my mortal preoccupations wound tightly like a rope snaking down my throat and through my digestive tract curling neatly below my navel, you were bursting out of yours, your brilliant blood running from your tares and washing down the streets into the gutters and back out into the big wide field in which you roamed. you prohibited my retreat into the sealed imaginary, my transcending into cultivated light. moral compass? you had none. you had no borders, no boundaries, and your maniacal force snapped my very perfect edges. i approached the limits of my symptomatic and treasured flesh. you were as real as this very dark, this very external stain and i couldn’t bare to wash you off like the rest of my earthly tethers.
what was my internal necessity? the bone in my throat. candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. my geometry, my reservoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.
* material appearing in italics is taken from selected writings of julia kristeva (1941-)
Friday, January 8, 2010
Friendship Triangle
Light / Luz : White noise. Clean walls, fresh paint, china. Domesticity. Friendship. Visible anatomy; Pressed napkins, hot irons. Sanitation. Tennis skirts. distillation. Private bathrooms. Flat Screens, sopranos, strings of pearls, cups of sugar. Anorexia. Architecture. Academia. Eugenics. Vodka sodas, small talk. Father. Voicemail. Light pollution. Ice.
Gray Area / Medio: collective memory. affection. pencil marks. carbohydrate. guilt. friendship triangles, café con leche. windshields, silence, email. parallel lines. lures. scotch tape. smoked glass. film. lean meat. dream-states. Adhesives, dust. The texture of the symptom, its snaking parts, like long tongues wetting my limbs. The dwelling space within our poetic hierarchies; you are contingent, punctual and fragile at your points of entry. Contaminating, becoming, dissolving. Gift and reserve. The baking rhythm, rising, icing, dripping, slicing open. The border surveyor, silver chief.
Dark / Oscuro: Cravings, throats. Nightmares. Racism. Soot, Neglect. Precoscious children. Depth. Secret. Proximity, heat, fire, sex. Thick hair, eye contact. Tar, 4-day hair. Stimulants, jealousy, attention. Mother. Deep night sky.
What was our internal necessity? The bone in my throat. Candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. Light as gift, dark as reserve. You and you, my triangle, my resevoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.
Gray Area / Medio: collective memory. affection. pencil marks. carbohydrate. guilt. friendship triangles, café con leche. windshields, silence, email. parallel lines. lures. scotch tape. smoked glass. film. lean meat. dream-states. Adhesives, dust. The texture of the symptom, its snaking parts, like long tongues wetting my limbs. The dwelling space within our poetic hierarchies; you are contingent, punctual and fragile at your points of entry. Contaminating, becoming, dissolving. Gift and reserve. The baking rhythm, rising, icing, dripping, slicing open. The border surveyor, silver chief.
Dark / Oscuro: Cravings, throats. Nightmares. Racism. Soot, Neglect. Precoscious children. Depth. Secret. Proximity, heat, fire, sex. Thick hair, eye contact. Tar, 4-day hair. Stimulants, jealousy, attention. Mother. Deep night sky.
What was our internal necessity? The bone in my throat. Candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. Light as gift, dark as reserve. You and you, my triangle, my resevoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.
Anxiety Banquet
The house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and it’s most immediate effort, I shall even say, it’s suffering. The result is only obtained by constant repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird’s breast, its heart, surely with difficulty breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations. (Jules Michelet, L’oisseau, 4th Edition, 1858)
At the banquet, the mother never spilled a drop or made a stain, never let loose a lick. I looked on in pain as she groomed her steaming dishes in a mechanized waltz - gravy, candied berries, honeyed ham, creamed potatoes, she lifting, stirring and separating with her cooking wands; clean, fresh and cold like a young pearl protected from the sticky, hot, spicy stink of those foods pulsing beneath their white lids until dinner time.
The tendency of crystals, certain minerals and rocks is that they break in preferred directions so as to yield more or less smooth surfaces, called cleavage planes. These are interfaces, they are like cracks, they are the gem's defense against boundary confusion. They yield what appears to be solid, smooth units, flat units, contained units; but it is the cracks that reference my lost hopes*
I prayed I was a border crosser, that I had double visions, that I could please the banquet mother and the banquet father without deserting myself.
I looked at each of the faces at the banquet. The sister, the brother, the stepsiblings, the uncles and animals and Grandma with her vanishing fingers glued to her golden goblet of wine. The aunt, who said, "I'm taking something." Who said, firmly, "I'm much better" and "much happier," automatism circling her face like a snake.
This one had a sister, whose every pore gleamed with the extempore flame of her mechanism; her breathe reeked of it as she excreted it in mists of vaporous ribaldry she flung about the table like fire sparks. You could tell the lens she looked through into the world made it bright. “I’ve found it,” she began dramatically, “a light for the night.” You couldn’t blame her for accepting it, this notion that there was no panacea, only little rushes of calculated euphoria (and the people you could love while the fury of the night in your heart rots out its fire) despite the deficits and disappointments that always rushed in like a flood. That you should find comfort and rush in, claw at it – until it made you an animal, a swan that sinks crying.
“The brain tissue, it conducts electricity! And these burdensome psychological thresholds, how they burst!” she sung, spittle gleaming from the crevices of her narrow animal teeth.
I looked deeper into this garden of the banquet, where inhabited space transcended the geometrics of the dining room. I saw the ancestral milk running into rivers and around islands, the putrid vegetable dust of dead mothers who shoved their brains in ovens, or drowned themselves in food and drink. Each ghost bloomed like a flower in its bed. I saw the anxiety that hung around these ghosts, and how what they could not master in life wrapped them like a cloak after death.
The banquet food called to me, shrilly, calling for me to make it my refuge. With syrup and butter married upon my hands I might have fashioned myself a large cradle. Would I submit to its terror? Would I refuse to eat? My little heart stayed back, she starved. My skin played the part of the classic daughter, the daughter seduced by glittering packages and holiday romance, pony-tailed, milk-drinking, rosey-cheeked and chirpy, chiming in during the discussion of safe topics (The weather. Recipes. Technology. Money. Finances) warmly from my very first nest.
Suddenly my lungs and all the other bodily drums ignited, listening to her, this beast that flooded the table with her monster music, her pitch rising against the sinking frowns of the monkey chorus, “I know in what pocket a woman keeps her heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to the lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall!”
Slap. My little heart skipped away for the moment, stolen by revery, still hungrily looking, for nourishment.
My little heart ran from the banquet, from its ominous aroma, that thick stink that struck the air like a bellwether. She ran under careless moonbeams into the forest, where she could dance too much under the stars that rubbed away filial tethers.
How freely the imagination remakes space. My heart danced with the Wilis that night during the banquet while my body could not. If you don't know them, the Wilis are womenlike creatures that appear to mortal men in the night. They take pleasure in the seduction of these men, enticing them and vanishing, luring them into a dance that can only end in their death from exhaustion.
My heart (pulsing, palpitating) thrust herself into this beastly underworld. I wanted the felicitous liaison I made in the forest with the Wili's to invade the banquet where my skin and bones still remained. Could this dream skip from soul to soul?
This garden that grew up all around me during the banquet was fierce, and I felt like a swelling fruit pressing up against its sides. My body sectioned out into independent events - skin, mouth, limbs and of course, my internal organs, which won out in the end for being so hot, so angry, bubbling over from their pots and spilling out like lava on the crisp white table cloth, the cream carpet, burning the hands of the mother and sister and brother and the tongues of the animals as they licked up my hot spilling flesh.
- material in italics has been taken from Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937)
At the banquet, the mother never spilled a drop or made a stain, never let loose a lick. I looked on in pain as she groomed her steaming dishes in a mechanized waltz - gravy, candied berries, honeyed ham, creamed potatoes, she lifting, stirring and separating with her cooking wands; clean, fresh and cold like a young pearl protected from the sticky, hot, spicy stink of those foods pulsing beneath their white lids until dinner time.
The tendency of crystals, certain minerals and rocks is that they break in preferred directions so as to yield more or less smooth surfaces, called cleavage planes. These are interfaces, they are like cracks, they are the gem's defense against boundary confusion. They yield what appears to be solid, smooth units, flat units, contained units; but it is the cracks that reference my lost hopes*
I prayed I was a border crosser, that I had double visions, that I could please the banquet mother and the banquet father without deserting myself.
I looked at each of the faces at the banquet. The sister, the brother, the stepsiblings, the uncles and animals and Grandma with her vanishing fingers glued to her golden goblet of wine. The aunt, who said, "I'm taking something." Who said, firmly, "I'm much better" and "much happier," automatism circling her face like a snake.
This one had a sister, whose every pore gleamed with the extempore flame of her mechanism; her breathe reeked of it as she excreted it in mists of vaporous ribaldry she flung about the table like fire sparks. You could tell the lens she looked through into the world made it bright. “I’ve found it,” she began dramatically, “a light for the night.” You couldn’t blame her for accepting it, this notion that there was no panacea, only little rushes of calculated euphoria (and the people you could love while the fury of the night in your heart rots out its fire) despite the deficits and disappointments that always rushed in like a flood. That you should find comfort and rush in, claw at it – until it made you an animal, a swan that sinks crying.
“The brain tissue, it conducts electricity! And these burdensome psychological thresholds, how they burst!” she sung, spittle gleaming from the crevices of her narrow animal teeth.
I looked deeper into this garden of the banquet, where inhabited space transcended the geometrics of the dining room. I saw the ancestral milk running into rivers and around islands, the putrid vegetable dust of dead mothers who shoved their brains in ovens, or drowned themselves in food and drink. Each ghost bloomed like a flower in its bed. I saw the anxiety that hung around these ghosts, and how what they could not master in life wrapped them like a cloak after death.
The banquet food called to me, shrilly, calling for me to make it my refuge. With syrup and butter married upon my hands I might have fashioned myself a large cradle. Would I submit to its terror? Would I refuse to eat? My little heart stayed back, she starved. My skin played the part of the classic daughter, the daughter seduced by glittering packages and holiday romance, pony-tailed, milk-drinking, rosey-cheeked and chirpy, chiming in during the discussion of safe topics (The weather. Recipes. Technology. Money. Finances) warmly from my very first nest.
Suddenly my lungs and all the other bodily drums ignited, listening to her, this beast that flooded the table with her monster music, her pitch rising against the sinking frowns of the monkey chorus, “I know in what pocket a woman keeps her heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to the lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall!”
Slap. My little heart skipped away for the moment, stolen by revery, still hungrily looking, for nourishment.
My little heart ran from the banquet, from its ominous aroma, that thick stink that struck the air like a bellwether. She ran under careless moonbeams into the forest, where she could dance too much under the stars that rubbed away filial tethers.
How freely the imagination remakes space. My heart danced with the Wilis that night during the banquet while my body could not. If you don't know them, the Wilis are womenlike creatures that appear to mortal men in the night. They take pleasure in the seduction of these men, enticing them and vanishing, luring them into a dance that can only end in their death from exhaustion.
My heart (pulsing, palpitating) thrust herself into this beastly underworld. I wanted the felicitous liaison I made in the forest with the Wili's to invade the banquet where my skin and bones still remained. Could this dream skip from soul to soul?
This garden that grew up all around me during the banquet was fierce, and I felt like a swelling fruit pressing up against its sides. My body sectioned out into independent events - skin, mouth, limbs and of course, my internal organs, which won out in the end for being so hot, so angry, bubbling over from their pots and spilling out like lava on the crisp white table cloth, the cream carpet, burning the hands of the mother and sister and brother and the tongues of the animals as they licked up my hot spilling flesh.
- material in italics has been taken from Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937)
Elegant Device: Art as Coping Mechanism?
When I visited Katie six months ago at her studio on Starr St. in Brooklyn, she greeted me in a lime bathing suit, her skin dotted with sequins, wielding a hammer she would abruptly use to destroy one of her glittering collages. She slammed it down hard into the work repeatedly, large chunks of debris flying side to side and sweat beads running down her brow as she spoke furiously, “This is the most constructive I’ve been in the studio for months! My frustration over the attention I’ve sought in New York and not found has reached extreme levels, I’ve been courting the institution for so long now I have internalized its oppressive hegemony, denying myself the permission to work freely - being here in my studio it is nearly impossible to fight the urge to destroy everything!”
Katie recalled to me pointedly the often pathological, compulsive urges she has acted on in the past concerning her studio practice and men. If you ask her, she will tell you that the Midwest, the Southwest, the South and a large section of New York know her as Jess, the name of her current boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She will tell you that for two years she has called her boyfriend Gavin, the name of someone who treated her very badly who she can only forget by remembering. Says Freud, “the artist, like the neurotic, withdraw[s] from an unsatisfying reality into [the] world of imagination…unlike the neurotic, she [knows] how to find a way back from it and once more get a firm foothold in reality.” The artist may have a fruitful career and possess adequate or above average social adeptness yet will continue to demonstrate the antisocial narcissistic principle of omnipotence of thought (1). Jess is a form of protective subterfuge. By going as Gav & Jess, the artists exercise their own power to name. Says Cercone, “We live in a culture which constantly attempts to define our desires for us, to insist that there are “correct” images and “correct” narratives. Every time I speak the name Gavin I am struck with the meaning of this game which is only ours.” Cercone made a similar maneuver in 2007 when she branded her back thigh with the word Boyfriend.
Her work is an exercise in identity scavenging - the theft and deployment of the master narrative and its codes (2) as they are authorized/(de)authorized by the Western social apparatus. The artist has reclaimed this term, “Boyfriend” as a rejoinder to the social reality that most women still determine their status based on their affiliations with men. A distinct flavor of self-indulgence cloaks the luster of her ideological warfare; her insignia provides multiple and shifting indices, each providing its own entry point – into victory, into vanity, into failure and into fear.
Freud defined art as a “fraudulent illusion of healing;” a mere “fortuitous pleasure” which is actually a “symptom of a maladaptation to reality” (1). Here we can address the solipsistic and self-revelatory nature of the artist in question and her very questionable need, or perhaps “desire” to be healed. Clearly – Cercone’s candy coated chicanery masquerading as art fills the expressive niche of a very privileged class of girl. One who pathologically challenges a system to which she remains wed “by an umbilical cord of gold” (3) In her latest work we see emerging a specific brand of infantile escapism involving ponies, stains, fake cakes and the artist singing Marquis de Sade over Lil’ Wayne like a child sinking sweetly into the oblivion of cooption. Although the gesture is smart and the faded ice cream cones, diamonds and Minnie paraphernalia she sews to used bed sheets are pleasing to look at Cercone treads on dangerous territory as she appropriates cultural material which is not her own. Can a young white female artist take on the misogyny of rap music, the racial colonial imperialism of Walt Disney and the topical consumption of the racial other she finds pleasure in through both all in one stroke – meanwhile having her cake and her booty-hop Minnie minstrel show and eating it too? Cercone resorts again and again to “metaphysical doubling, transcendental explosions, fabricated epiphanies of reconciliation,” at the very highest pitches of hypocrisy she regurgitates “desire[s] which seek to externalize [themselves] in social practice” exploring “a world which objectively exists as raw material for [wo]man’s appropriation” (4) We can trace this thread of her current work to a series of art as coping mechanism Cercone developed from 2005-7 titled “Heartbreak Diet.”
Cercone defines Diet as a system by which energy is redirected. It is a process which fosters the release of energetic potential from the dull cerebral trappings of obsession. It is “epiphany and apocalypse,” (1) or, the absorption and release of psychic pain. In 2007 Cercone recorded herself listening to Justin Timberlake’s hit single My Love, simultaneously disposing of the oppressive noise through her larynx, she explains: “Anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. I caught myself over consuming the object fulfilling the false need and purging it rapidly: in ears →out throat.” A complete affront to the laws of efficiency produced by a homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest. A stain (her scream), is the residue of a heterogeneous threat on a public surface she entered and scared. Here “public surface” alludes to the use of a found mixed tape as canvas. Cercone explains by nature of its status as anachronism, the tape is a space left “unguarded and unsealed,” where she can secretly layer her subversive message, as if “sound were mattress.”
What I’d like to propose is that Cercone’s work is an elegant device; a deconstructive tool designed to carry one off into oblivion (the very darkest luxury of art) as much as it disrupts the paralysis of the master narrative, and subsequently, undermines it’s own usage. Her work is syrupy sweet, grotesque and packs a troubling socio-cultural critique that just barely makes sense.
Notes
1. Kuspit, Donald B. Artist Envy in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
2. Tickner, Lisa. Sexuality and/in Representation in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
3. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939) pp.34-49.
4. E. San Juan Toward a Peoples Literature E. San Juan Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1984
Katie recalled to me pointedly the often pathological, compulsive urges she has acted on in the past concerning her studio practice and men. If you ask her, she will tell you that the Midwest, the Southwest, the South and a large section of New York know her as Jess, the name of her current boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She will tell you that for two years she has called her boyfriend Gavin, the name of someone who treated her very badly who she can only forget by remembering. Says Freud, “the artist, like the neurotic, withdraw[s] from an unsatisfying reality into [the] world of imagination…unlike the neurotic, she [knows] how to find a way back from it and once more get a firm foothold in reality.” The artist may have a fruitful career and possess adequate or above average social adeptness yet will continue to demonstrate the antisocial narcissistic principle of omnipotence of thought (1). Jess is a form of protective subterfuge. By going as Gav & Jess, the artists exercise their own power to name. Says Cercone, “We live in a culture which constantly attempts to define our desires for us, to insist that there are “correct” images and “correct” narratives. Every time I speak the name Gavin I am struck with the meaning of this game which is only ours.” Cercone made a similar maneuver in 2007 when she branded her back thigh with the word Boyfriend.
Her work is an exercise in identity scavenging - the theft and deployment of the master narrative and its codes (2) as they are authorized/(de)authorized by the Western social apparatus. The artist has reclaimed this term, “Boyfriend” as a rejoinder to the social reality that most women still determine their status based on their affiliations with men. A distinct flavor of self-indulgence cloaks the luster of her ideological warfare; her insignia provides multiple and shifting indices, each providing its own entry point – into victory, into vanity, into failure and into fear.
Freud defined art as a “fraudulent illusion of healing;” a mere “fortuitous pleasure” which is actually a “symptom of a maladaptation to reality” (1). Here we can address the solipsistic and self-revelatory nature of the artist in question and her very questionable need, or perhaps “desire” to be healed. Clearly – Cercone’s candy coated chicanery masquerading as art fills the expressive niche of a very privileged class of girl. One who pathologically challenges a system to which she remains wed “by an umbilical cord of gold” (3) In her latest work we see emerging a specific brand of infantile escapism involving ponies, stains, fake cakes and the artist singing Marquis de Sade over Lil’ Wayne like a child sinking sweetly into the oblivion of cooption. Although the gesture is smart and the faded ice cream cones, diamonds and Minnie paraphernalia she sews to used bed sheets are pleasing to look at Cercone treads on dangerous territory as she appropriates cultural material which is not her own. Can a young white female artist take on the misogyny of rap music, the racial colonial imperialism of Walt Disney and the topical consumption of the racial other she finds pleasure in through both all in one stroke – meanwhile having her cake and her booty-hop Minnie minstrel show and eating it too? Cercone resorts again and again to “metaphysical doubling, transcendental explosions, fabricated epiphanies of reconciliation,” at the very highest pitches of hypocrisy she regurgitates “desire[s] which seek to externalize [themselves] in social practice” exploring “a world which objectively exists as raw material for [wo]man’s appropriation” (4) We can trace this thread of her current work to a series of art as coping mechanism Cercone developed from 2005-7 titled “Heartbreak Diet.”
Cercone defines Diet as a system by which energy is redirected. It is a process which fosters the release of energetic potential from the dull cerebral trappings of obsession. It is “epiphany and apocalypse,” (1) or, the absorption and release of psychic pain. In 2007 Cercone recorded herself listening to Justin Timberlake’s hit single My Love, simultaneously disposing of the oppressive noise through her larynx, she explains: “Anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. I caught myself over consuming the object fulfilling the false need and purging it rapidly: in ears →out throat.” A complete affront to the laws of efficiency produced by a homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest. A stain (her scream), is the residue of a heterogeneous threat on a public surface she entered and scared. Here “public surface” alludes to the use of a found mixed tape as canvas. Cercone explains by nature of its status as anachronism, the tape is a space left “unguarded and unsealed,” where she can secretly layer her subversive message, as if “sound were mattress.”
What I’d like to propose is that Cercone’s work is an elegant device; a deconstructive tool designed to carry one off into oblivion (the very darkest luxury of art) as much as it disrupts the paralysis of the master narrative, and subsequently, undermines it’s own usage. Her work is syrupy sweet, grotesque and packs a troubling socio-cultural critique that just barely makes sense.
Notes
1. Kuspit, Donald B. Artist Envy in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
2. Tickner, Lisa. Sexuality and/in Representation in Risotti, Howard. Psychoanalytical Criticism and Art. Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1990
3. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939) pp.34-49.
4. E. San Juan Toward a Peoples Literature E. San Juan Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1984
Tracey Emin's Horizontal Monument
Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Tracey Emin read excerpts from her novel Strangeland - a bittersweet memoir of her seaside teenage sexual exploits now read by British public school children –at Performa’s Lust Weekend. Despite the juicey nature of all the secrets divulged, the message I took away was, “Everyone should write poetry.” Likewise, in Emin’s current exhibition at Lehmann Maupin’s lower east side gallery, (Only God Knows I’m Good) it is the words scrawled beside the sexually-charged imagery of her monoprints, neon and needleworks which make the artist and the work so redemptive.
A scared child in the fetal position lies beside the words The Past is Coming Fast. Filling in the white space between Emin’s signature imagery appear broken thoughts like Always Dancing…Alone Inside Your Head Hurting Not Just Yourself or Some Crazy Fucked up Dog Like Hell…That’s How it Feels to Love Without Love or Hope You are Pregnant… Pregnant with More Guilt than you Are Able to Live With. A pair of gruesome legs with hoof-like feet stand open, exhausted, injured, immobilized, and crowned by a blossoming ring of pubic hair. Although the forms are familiar to those acquainted with her work, they have hardly calcified. In her new animation, a pair of hands convulse furiously at a vagina like a player piano, in another the same legs rise into a stately fairytale gown. In Only God Knows I’m Good Emin juxtaposes her horizontal nudes with the likeness an upright, gowned, Jane Eyre or princess-like figure, her face blackened out and the “salty line” of her skirt almost in motion. In Nothing Touches, the gowned figure appears to be twirling, suggestive of a whirling dervish, the Sufi emblem of female power and spiritual ecstasy (or perhaps hysteria; emotional and psychic distress having been long considered a sign of both creativity and sexual abandon in females (1).
There’s a certain pleasure, particularly for women, in reliving the sense of elation in elegy; in confession, delirium, and overcoming. Emin’s distinct union of words and images continue the tradition of personal narrative in feminist art; what critic Lucy Lippard considers, “collage as dialectic,” and as “interruption and the healing instinct” (2). Emin erects both a horizontal monument and a message: Sex is pain. Sex is torture. Love also, is terribly painful. Only transcendence is perfect.
Shamelessly brazen in her appeals to popular culture (Ms. Emin is current poet in residence at GQ Magazine) and publicly transparent concerning her humble origins, she employs her own [cunt] vernacular (3), a strategy long associated with feminist aims of reconstructing a history of art largely dominated by Modernist (4) dependence on and antagonism toward the bourgeois establishment. Tracey Emin is the gum chewing public, and her body is a transgressive figure within the conventions of the art world (5). It is her unique brand of disco seduction that has the “culture vultures” of New York City, London, and Paris swooping in to ogle the artist’s iconoclastic, post-coital – body? lump? corpse? “Everyone should write poetry,” she reminds us, “it doesn’t have to be good.”
Her new animation, Emin insists, is about masturbation. Using a climax metaphor in the spirit of French theorist Helene Cixous, she explains that, unlike male artists who reach a career peak, “Women keep cuming.” Tracey alludes to the legendary sculptor Louise Bourgeois (now over 100 years old and still creating) whose sculpture evokes anger, childhood, and the body as spiritual territory in like fashion. Tracey, grinning proudly, announces that they are collaborating.
Notes
1. Werkner, P. The Child-Woman and Hysteria: Images of the Female Body in the Art of Schiele, in Viennese Modernism and Today in Townsend, Chris and Merck, Mandy (eds) The Art of Tracey Emin London: Thames & Hudson, 2002
2. Lippard, L. Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc. 1984
3. Cunt Vernacular was the title of a 1997 Tracey Emin film.
4. Burnham, Jack. “Patriarchal Tendencies in the Feminist Art Movement” The New Art Examiner (Summer 1977)
5. Lehman, Ulrich. The Trademark of Tracey Emin in Townsend, Chris and Merck, Mandy (eds) The Art of Tracey Emin London: Thames & Hudson, 2002
A scared child in the fetal position lies beside the words The Past is Coming Fast. Filling in the white space between Emin’s signature imagery appear broken thoughts like Always Dancing…Alone Inside Your Head Hurting Not Just Yourself or Some Crazy Fucked up Dog Like Hell…That’s How it Feels to Love Without Love or Hope You are Pregnant… Pregnant with More Guilt than you Are Able to Live With. A pair of gruesome legs with hoof-like feet stand open, exhausted, injured, immobilized, and crowned by a blossoming ring of pubic hair. Although the forms are familiar to those acquainted with her work, they have hardly calcified. In her new animation, a pair of hands convulse furiously at a vagina like a player piano, in another the same legs rise into a stately fairytale gown. In Only God Knows I’m Good Emin juxtaposes her horizontal nudes with the likeness an upright, gowned, Jane Eyre or princess-like figure, her face blackened out and the “salty line” of her skirt almost in motion. In Nothing Touches, the gowned figure appears to be twirling, suggestive of a whirling dervish, the Sufi emblem of female power and spiritual ecstasy (or perhaps hysteria; emotional and psychic distress having been long considered a sign of both creativity and sexual abandon in females (1).
There’s a certain pleasure, particularly for women, in reliving the sense of elation in elegy; in confession, delirium, and overcoming. Emin’s distinct union of words and images continue the tradition of personal narrative in feminist art; what critic Lucy Lippard considers, “collage as dialectic,” and as “interruption and the healing instinct” (2). Emin erects both a horizontal monument and a message: Sex is pain. Sex is torture. Love also, is terribly painful. Only transcendence is perfect.
Shamelessly brazen in her appeals to popular culture (Ms. Emin is current poet in residence at GQ Magazine) and publicly transparent concerning her humble origins, she employs her own [cunt] vernacular (3), a strategy long associated with feminist aims of reconstructing a history of art largely dominated by Modernist (4) dependence on and antagonism toward the bourgeois establishment. Tracey Emin is the gum chewing public, and her body is a transgressive figure within the conventions of the art world (5). It is her unique brand of disco seduction that has the “culture vultures” of New York City, London, and Paris swooping in to ogle the artist’s iconoclastic, post-coital – body? lump? corpse? “Everyone should write poetry,” she reminds us, “it doesn’t have to be good.”
Her new animation, Emin insists, is about masturbation. Using a climax metaphor in the spirit of French theorist Helene Cixous, she explains that, unlike male artists who reach a career peak, “Women keep cuming.” Tracey alludes to the legendary sculptor Louise Bourgeois (now over 100 years old and still creating) whose sculpture evokes anger, childhood, and the body as spiritual territory in like fashion. Tracey, grinning proudly, announces that they are collaborating.
Notes
1. Werkner, P. The Child-Woman and Hysteria: Images of the Female Body in the Art of Schiele, in Viennese Modernism and Today in Townsend, Chris and Merck, Mandy (eds) The Art of Tracey Emin London: Thames & Hudson, 2002
2. Lippard, L. Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc. 1984
3. Cunt Vernacular was the title of a 1997 Tracey Emin film.
4. Burnham, Jack. “Patriarchal Tendencies in the Feminist Art Movement” The New Art Examiner (Summer 1977)
5. Lehman, Ulrich. The Trademark of Tracey Emin in Townsend, Chris and Merck, Mandy (eds) The Art of Tracey Emin London: Thames & Hudson, 2002
Death Instinct
desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body*
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
the prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channeled, regulated.
the death instinct – when my mechanisms fail to damn up an urge, and something unearthly, something razor sharp courses through me swiftly. routine motions feel dangerous, hyper-speed, painful, suspect. what monster lies at the end of my charm-chain? he who has designed for me a series of cravings, satisfied only by my very perfect alienation.
the intrinsic power of desire to create its own object – if only in an unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form…
again, i set out, looking for a mystery that would feel new, looking for a mental embankment that would, at least, be of my own creation. oh world – won’t you envelope me, sweep me up, ravish me with magical thinking? i combed my beaches and yours, looking for clues, for darts of adrenaline i could fold between my orphaned, shallow breathing.
the wind is free and i am alone again - the moon’s mist, ruptures of light and reflection, sound and echo wrapping up around me like a marvelous cloak. if only this nourishment alone would suffice. that infectious melody floats up from below, dissonant and familiar,
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. hoping to meet someone interesting for dinner tonite. i drive and we can go or meet at a restaurant... i’m looking for a someone to hang out with for drinks. take out and drinks? i only drink socially. looking for a fun, pretty and affectionate woman for dinner date. really wish i had something lined up with a cute girl tonight ( a drink or maybe even eating outside somewhere cool). any ladies up for a drink & movie tonight? we can go for a ride around the city in my classic car and go to a great resturant. drinks, dinner, starbucks, people watching? would like to share drinks and dinner with a lovely woman. it's 4:45 on saturday, and I'm looking to go around 7:00 (although I'm flexible on that). also open on food type - lets decide together! i am planning on an 8:30 pm seating. i do hope you can join me. lets go out have dinner and a movie. i’m tired of meeting the wrong people in bars clubs and lounges. we'll have martinis, chat and get this summer started. i like little dive bars, but occasionally it's nice to get dressed up and head to a lounge. i would love to talk over drinks, and if we connect maybe watch a movie. let's meet up for drinks and go from there! maybe this evening, a movie, jazz bar, some wine or drinks or otherwise? i'm looking for a nice woman that would be interested in meeting for a drink. go party, have drinks, dinner, catch a show or movie. want to hang out to a movie or dinner. i love movies, dining out, shopping, amusement, romance... i love movies, dining out, shopping, amusement, romance... i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
you found me torn at the edges and starving, eager to make a square, safe, epicurean investment. this feeling of lack fluttered around, glittering and capsizing at my palms. what codes grant access to this reality? what naturally ruling government of instincts suffers when sublimation and subterfuge reign? these words set out like death vessels in the night, carrying the weak and the illiterate, carrying those passengers that longed to be ravished by self-gratifying designs. rot language rung out like an elegiacal chorus, a fluttering of knives and forks banging again and again, fat fingers shooting up, gesturing, begging, belching, demanding: status! intimacy! comfort! service! like a terrible alphabet, this chorus, tracing its signs directly on my body, a system of cruelty:
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. hoping to meet someone interesting for dinner tonite. i drive and we can go or meet at a restaurant... it is the displacement of the limit that haunts all societies; namely, the decoded flows of desire.
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. FOR STARTERS, WE WILL TRAVEL TO THE CARIBBEAN SEVERAL TIMES PER YEAR, EUROPE AND EXOTIC COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD. WE WILL STAY IN EXCELLENT HOTELS AND DINE AT THE FINEST RESTAURANTS. you may not believe this, but i actually know a starbucks where we can get an overpriced, over roasted cappuccino and "continue" this conversation before the night. maybe we can have a drinks first. maybe we can have a drinks first. maybe we can have a drinks first. is there any single female that would like to catch a movie today? just a harmless meeting, if thing goes well we can do something else afterward, like dinner or drinks. you woke up wishing that you were next to someone you love, spent the day having brunch together followed by some shopping in soho, saw a movie in union square, walked across the street to whole foods to buy some groceries, had fun in the kitchen cooking a nice meal together, then cuddled on the couch the rest of the night watching movies and drinking wine until you fell asleep in each others arms. when we meet for a cup of coffee or a drink we can see each other without any strings attached.
this psychic melody, this despicable routine; reaching for that unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form of nourishment. our wretched amusements grew upon hidden, ancient ruins. this trap, i whispered, i am its purveyor. looking for a fun, pretty and affectionate woman for dinner date. with greasy used napkins folded in diamond shape over my elbow, my eyelids heavy, fluttering just above closed to murmur sweetly – open for business – yet still aggressive, efficient, bleached; smiling stunningly from the belly of this dark, safe, predictable mechanism. it was cannibalism!
desire is an exile, desire is a dessert that traverses the body,
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
* this piece is comprised of three overlapping parts: material appearing in italics has been taken from “anti-oedipus: capitalism & schizophrenia,” by gilles deleuze & felix guattari (1983). additional segments were borrowed from male to female personal ads on craigslist and the remaining text is my own.
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
the prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channeled, regulated.
the death instinct – when my mechanisms fail to damn up an urge, and something unearthly, something razor sharp courses through me swiftly. routine motions feel dangerous, hyper-speed, painful, suspect. what monster lies at the end of my charm-chain? he who has designed for me a series of cravings, satisfied only by my very perfect alienation.
the intrinsic power of desire to create its own object – if only in an unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form…
again, i set out, looking for a mystery that would feel new, looking for a mental embankment that would, at least, be of my own creation. oh world – won’t you envelope me, sweep me up, ravish me with magical thinking? i combed my beaches and yours, looking for clues, for darts of adrenaline i could fold between my orphaned, shallow breathing.
the wind is free and i am alone again - the moon’s mist, ruptures of light and reflection, sound and echo wrapping up around me like a marvelous cloak. if only this nourishment alone would suffice. that infectious melody floats up from below, dissonant and familiar,
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. hoping to meet someone interesting for dinner tonite. i drive and we can go or meet at a restaurant... i’m looking for a someone to hang out with for drinks. take out and drinks? i only drink socially. looking for a fun, pretty and affectionate woman for dinner date. really wish i had something lined up with a cute girl tonight ( a drink or maybe even eating outside somewhere cool). any ladies up for a drink & movie tonight? we can go for a ride around the city in my classic car and go to a great resturant. drinks, dinner, starbucks, people watching? would like to share drinks and dinner with a lovely woman. it's 4:45 on saturday, and I'm looking to go around 7:00 (although I'm flexible on that). also open on food type - lets decide together! i am planning on an 8:30 pm seating. i do hope you can join me. lets go out have dinner and a movie. i’m tired of meeting the wrong people in bars clubs and lounges. we'll have martinis, chat and get this summer started. i like little dive bars, but occasionally it's nice to get dressed up and head to a lounge. i would love to talk over drinks, and if we connect maybe watch a movie. let's meet up for drinks and go from there! maybe this evening, a movie, jazz bar, some wine or drinks or otherwise? i'm looking for a nice woman that would be interested in meeting for a drink. go party, have drinks, dinner, catch a show or movie. want to hang out to a movie or dinner. i love movies, dining out, shopping, amusement, romance... i love movies, dining out, shopping, amusement, romance... i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
you found me torn at the edges and starving, eager to make a square, safe, epicurean investment. this feeling of lack fluttered around, glittering and capsizing at my palms. what codes grant access to this reality? what naturally ruling government of instincts suffers when sublimation and subterfuge reign? these words set out like death vessels in the night, carrying the weak and the illiterate, carrying those passengers that longed to be ravished by self-gratifying designs. rot language rung out like an elegiacal chorus, a fluttering of knives and forks banging again and again, fat fingers shooting up, gesturing, begging, belching, demanding: status! intimacy! comfort! service! like a terrible alphabet, this chorus, tracing its signs directly on my body, a system of cruelty:
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. hoping to meet someone interesting for dinner tonite. i drive and we can go or meet at a restaurant... it is the displacement of the limit that haunts all societies; namely, the decoded flows of desire.
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie. FOR STARTERS, WE WILL TRAVEL TO THE CARIBBEAN SEVERAL TIMES PER YEAR, EUROPE AND EXOTIC COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD. WE WILL STAY IN EXCELLENT HOTELS AND DINE AT THE FINEST RESTAURANTS. you may not believe this, but i actually know a starbucks where we can get an overpriced, over roasted cappuccino and "continue" this conversation before the night. maybe we can have a drinks first. maybe we can have a drinks first. maybe we can have a drinks first. is there any single female that would like to catch a movie today? just a harmless meeting, if thing goes well we can do something else afterward, like dinner or drinks. you woke up wishing that you were next to someone you love, spent the day having brunch together followed by some shopping in soho, saw a movie in union square, walked across the street to whole foods to buy some groceries, had fun in the kitchen cooking a nice meal together, then cuddled on the couch the rest of the night watching movies and drinking wine until you fell asleep in each others arms. when we meet for a cup of coffee or a drink we can see each other without any strings attached.
this psychic melody, this despicable routine; reaching for that unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form of nourishment. our wretched amusements grew upon hidden, ancient ruins. this trap, i whispered, i am its purveyor. looking for a fun, pretty and affectionate woman for dinner date. with greasy used napkins folded in diamond shape over my elbow, my eyelids heavy, fluttering just above closed to murmur sweetly – open for business – yet still aggressive, efficient, bleached; smiling stunningly from the belly of this dark, safe, predictable mechanism. it was cannibalism!
desire is an exile, desire is a dessert that traverses the body,
i'm looking for a date tonight: dinner, drinks, or we can go see a movie.
* this piece is comprised of three overlapping parts: material appearing in italics has been taken from “anti-oedipus: capitalism & schizophrenia,” by gilles deleuze & felix guattari (1983). additional segments were borrowed from male to female personal ads on craigslist and the remaining text is my own.
Recoveress
The dark, the light, the ultraviolet. Violet – that girl walking down the street to choruses of men cheering, every honk her church bell, she taking it in hungrily like some dose of cheap liquer, each street corner a symphony tuned in the key of violeta, veronica, veruka, va-va-voom, every last droplet of her brittle sexuality tainted by this constant input; it attenuated her, and yet like the neon lights that punctuated her urban view, it was what she fed off of.
Violet's rituals: anything chocolate. Tracing figure eights with her hips in front of the mirror to music until she collapsed with exhaustion. Stalking lost men and turning life into a sick dream. Lavender flavored douches. Gold toothpicks. Water was her purification rite, every night and every morning she drank 2 liters of it from a long crystal vase, imagining she might cleanse herself of the city's toxins, the sugar storm, sexual bacteria, eventually dislodging the bowling ball sitting in her stomach.
"Violet, sugar tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach's natural ability to move."
The unscratchable bitch of her addiction – she always knew better. Every extreme behavior was shrouded by an aura of subversion,
Trolling for quick highs, swim-suited in kitten heels clicking down summer's pavement under hemorrhages of moonlight and stars. She liked to fuck late at night, purring, screeching, twitching, fighting her lovers off like a feline when she grew dry. Men were just one fix among many - coke cocktails, espresso, milkshakes, city the vending machine. As long as she could keep up, the City would be this ever unfolding flower to her. She never came up for air. Her body was her best disguise, and she ignored each of its signals, shock, poke, prod.
If she wasn't physically seeking out thrills she was violently day dreaming about them,
standing by herself with a blank look in her eyes, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact that mentally, she was no longer here or there. Her work day was plagued by a swift, uncompromised long –term day dream:
Synchronized swimmers in champagne, crashing a wedding, breaking china, jet streams, super soakers, sweat soup, fear as romance. Rough fucking her black neighbors with those diamond studded earrings. Clipping squares from the mattresses that lay out for the trash men at night, pieces she would save and one day sew a patchwork quilt that would be a map to the sexual lives of all her fellows in the city. Her favorite trigger was brown hands, tiny brown hands were a reminder of the skinny, brown eyed and silky skinned children (the fantasy usually involved them twirling and laughing) she would have had with him if he had ever called her back. He was the first man from whom she had ever wanted pregnancy; the first time she ever harbored the secret evil longing to use a baby as a trap, a keeper, a currency.
Violet had an alter ego, a strong, quiet, creative girl that rose with the sun, brushed her teeth, meditated, stretched and went to group therapy. It was this other her, not Violet, that held this constant aching, gnawing, depressing insight –
"Violet, that's not boy glitter, that's a rash, Violet you only fall in love when you're intoxicated, your heart beats a little bit faster each day, from the caffeine, your abdomen is swollen, your favorite boyfriends don't return your phone calls, sugar is made from charred animal bones, baby, you're courting cancer like a cheap whore."
This other girl understood Violet desired an unhealthy reality. Every day she went to meetings, sat in circles with strangers, held their hands, accepted them as human beings unconditionally, everyone sober and honest.
She liked this feeling of serenity exactly in equal measure to the way Violet liked a dark storm box filled with hot bodies, loud music, dancing, rubbing, grinding, everyone tilting their heads back in unison drinking liquids and snorting powders as if they were a youth serum.
Violet never had to face the morning light, She walked home victoriously before dawn collecting street trash in her hands, twirling long strips of paper like ribbons in her own private parade. Then exhaustion set in and this other girl awoke in violet's place.
"Violet, why must you accept as normal what you find in a race of sickness and weakened human beings?"
As much as this other girl tried to manage the stewardship of her body at night, to kill Violet, to suffocate her during the hours of daylight with sun, serenity prayers, phone calls to her father, crying in public, plates of steamed kale…she always failed. She dreamt of sewing a cat suit that would allow her to slip out of the house at night as Violet and stay protected from harm, so that she might wake in the morning in good health. Such magic fabric didn't exist. Violet might disappear for days or weeks, but eventually she would always return, because Violet had tricks, blindfolds, mental perversions that were impossible to resist, at sunset Violet would drag this other girl back into her other world, another ecstatic relapse from reality, that dizzying, mechanical coma, whatever vices that had been withheld taken back by force. This girl couldn't let Violet go because above all else, she loved Violet, she idolized her.
there were 2 problems in this world: order and disorder, this other girl, and Violet. The only way to avoid that splitting pain was for both to be each, to let herself and Violet hold hands through each day and each night, a pretty pair.
There would be no killing off, no drying up, no murderess. Violeta, Veronica, Veruka, va-va-voom - stunning, infinite, tragic heroine. Topless with pearls, dancing under the electric lights, glowing, glittering with the residue of her sins, makeup melting, pooling at her feet as if she were a monument, a Madonna, connected seamlessly to the floor – moving statuette, graceful, steady there, spinning, dying.
Violet's rituals: anything chocolate. Tracing figure eights with her hips in front of the mirror to music until she collapsed with exhaustion. Stalking lost men and turning life into a sick dream. Lavender flavored douches. Gold toothpicks. Water was her purification rite, every night and every morning she drank 2 liters of it from a long crystal vase, imagining she might cleanse herself of the city's toxins, the sugar storm, sexual bacteria, eventually dislodging the bowling ball sitting in her stomach.
"Violet, sugar tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach's natural ability to move."
The unscratchable bitch of her addiction – she always knew better. Every extreme behavior was shrouded by an aura of subversion,
Trolling for quick highs, swim-suited in kitten heels clicking down summer's pavement under hemorrhages of moonlight and stars. She liked to fuck late at night, purring, screeching, twitching, fighting her lovers off like a feline when she grew dry. Men were just one fix among many - coke cocktails, espresso, milkshakes, city the vending machine. As long as she could keep up, the City would be this ever unfolding flower to her. She never came up for air. Her body was her best disguise, and she ignored each of its signals, shock, poke, prod.
If she wasn't physically seeking out thrills she was violently day dreaming about them,
standing by herself with a blank look in her eyes, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact that mentally, she was no longer here or there. Her work day was plagued by a swift, uncompromised long –term day dream:
Synchronized swimmers in champagne, crashing a wedding, breaking china, jet streams, super soakers, sweat soup, fear as romance. Rough fucking her black neighbors with those diamond studded earrings. Clipping squares from the mattresses that lay out for the trash men at night, pieces she would save and one day sew a patchwork quilt that would be a map to the sexual lives of all her fellows in the city. Her favorite trigger was brown hands, tiny brown hands were a reminder of the skinny, brown eyed and silky skinned children (the fantasy usually involved them twirling and laughing) she would have had with him if he had ever called her back. He was the first man from whom she had ever wanted pregnancy; the first time she ever harbored the secret evil longing to use a baby as a trap, a keeper, a currency.
Violet had an alter ego, a strong, quiet, creative girl that rose with the sun, brushed her teeth, meditated, stretched and went to group therapy. It was this other her, not Violet, that held this constant aching, gnawing, depressing insight –
"Violet, that's not boy glitter, that's a rash, Violet you only fall in love when you're intoxicated, your heart beats a little bit faster each day, from the caffeine, your abdomen is swollen, your favorite boyfriends don't return your phone calls, sugar is made from charred animal bones, baby, you're courting cancer like a cheap whore."
This other girl understood Violet desired an unhealthy reality. Every day she went to meetings, sat in circles with strangers, held their hands, accepted them as human beings unconditionally, everyone sober and honest.
She liked this feeling of serenity exactly in equal measure to the way Violet liked a dark storm box filled with hot bodies, loud music, dancing, rubbing, grinding, everyone tilting their heads back in unison drinking liquids and snorting powders as if they were a youth serum.
Violet never had to face the morning light, She walked home victoriously before dawn collecting street trash in her hands, twirling long strips of paper like ribbons in her own private parade. Then exhaustion set in and this other girl awoke in violet's place.
"Violet, why must you accept as normal what you find in a race of sickness and weakened human beings?"
As much as this other girl tried to manage the stewardship of her body at night, to kill Violet, to suffocate her during the hours of daylight with sun, serenity prayers, phone calls to her father, crying in public, plates of steamed kale…she always failed. She dreamt of sewing a cat suit that would allow her to slip out of the house at night as Violet and stay protected from harm, so that she might wake in the morning in good health. Such magic fabric didn't exist. Violet might disappear for days or weeks, but eventually she would always return, because Violet had tricks, blindfolds, mental perversions that were impossible to resist, at sunset Violet would drag this other girl back into her other world, another ecstatic relapse from reality, that dizzying, mechanical coma, whatever vices that had been withheld taken back by force. This girl couldn't let Violet go because above all else, she loved Violet, she idolized her.
there were 2 problems in this world: order and disorder, this other girl, and Violet. The only way to avoid that splitting pain was for both to be each, to let herself and Violet hold hands through each day and each night, a pretty pair.
There would be no killing off, no drying up, no murderess. Violeta, Veronica, Veruka, va-va-voom - stunning, infinite, tragic heroine. Topless with pearls, dancing under the electric lights, glowing, glittering with the residue of her sins, makeup melting, pooling at her feet as if she were a monument, a Madonna, connected seamlessly to the floor – moving statuette, graceful, steady there, spinning, dying.
Spirit Stitchers
At 6:00pm eastern standard time May 7, 2008 fifty B-2 Stealth Spirit Bombers flewn by on-duty United States Air Force aviator captains crashed in strategic locations in all fifty U.S. states. The flyers, each a female member of the United States National Guard under the age of 26, collectively call themselves, “the Synchronized Spirit Stitchers,” (S.S.S.), an underground paramilitary organization, the details of which are still largely unknown. The S.S.S. mission statement, cryptic, cursive-written paragraphs on scented stationary characterizing the group’s desirous will to destruction, was found in fifty identical suicide notes by relatives of the deceased stitchers:
As Synchronized Spirit Stitchers, our commanding ethos is the dismantling of this nation’s sanguine illusions of geographical impermeability and the blind, eternal fealty of the American soldier. We openly decry the myth of a cohesive, patriotic national defense force consisting of human fighting machines beholden in body and mind to its official ruling power. We will expose, through synchronized sky needlepoint suicide, an important instance of political atrophy, in which a significant faction of an apotropaic aerial warfare branch of the National Government turns over, slips, loops and stings; defeats herself.
Despite the government’s scramble to bury all evidence of the crashes, the Spirits’ suicides set in motion a media blitz commensurate with total air-wave takeover, the coup receiving significant coverage on every major news channel in 74 nations worldwide. Regardless of the organization’s very brief existence and the swift governmental divestiture of all information related to the cabal, the S.S.S. left a mysterious dent in the American consciousness, a blow that would corroborate the United States Government’s fear of total national moral decline enabling self-destruction. The arcane vision of the Synchronized Spirit Stitchers is preserved to this day by 50 6’ deep holes made at each B-2’s respective point of entrance. In addition, there exists curious radiographs of each pilot’s careening obtained by air traffic control on 05/07/2008, computer generated images nearly identical to a series of thread on paper needlepoints found in the top secret S.S.S. headquarters. When paired with the radiographs the needleworks indicate each B-2’s flight route literally spelled out an invisible polemic: an ephemeral imprint traced across the sky by each flyer during her dooming dissent, among the 50 were heterodoxy, treason, hope, girls, feminism, song, women & impavid. The memory of these tidy national miscreant’s bold bloodshed will surely stain textbooks for centuries to come.
As Synchronized Spirit Stitchers, our commanding ethos is the dismantling of this nation’s sanguine illusions of geographical impermeability and the blind, eternal fealty of the American soldier. We openly decry the myth of a cohesive, patriotic national defense force consisting of human fighting machines beholden in body and mind to its official ruling power. We will expose, through synchronized sky needlepoint suicide, an important instance of political atrophy, in which a significant faction of an apotropaic aerial warfare branch of the National Government turns over, slips, loops and stings; defeats herself.
Despite the government’s scramble to bury all evidence of the crashes, the Spirits’ suicides set in motion a media blitz commensurate with total air-wave takeover, the coup receiving significant coverage on every major news channel in 74 nations worldwide. Regardless of the organization’s very brief existence and the swift governmental divestiture of all information related to the cabal, the S.S.S. left a mysterious dent in the American consciousness, a blow that would corroborate the United States Government’s fear of total national moral decline enabling self-destruction. The arcane vision of the Synchronized Spirit Stitchers is preserved to this day by 50 6’ deep holes made at each B-2’s respective point of entrance. In addition, there exists curious radiographs of each pilot’s careening obtained by air traffic control on 05/07/2008, computer generated images nearly identical to a series of thread on paper needlepoints found in the top secret S.S.S. headquarters. When paired with the radiographs the needleworks indicate each B-2’s flight route literally spelled out an invisible polemic: an ephemeral imprint traced across the sky by each flyer during her dooming dissent, among the 50 were heterodoxy, treason, hope, girls, feminism, song, women & impavid. The memory of these tidy national miscreant’s bold bloodshed will surely stain textbooks for centuries to come.
i is Haunted
it crosses through us like a goddess. we cannot capture it. it makes us teeter with emotion. it is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. i is never an individual, i is haunted. i is always, before knowing anything, an i-Love-you.
we have acted out the war of everything in a private event. you and i are a structure that is singular and dual, both of us, bound by a double braid. we were enchanted by not-sex calling it “sex,” by not-rape calling it “rape,” by not-love calling it “love.” to tell the truth i trap each element in quotation marks.
i longed to reject “dating,” its trend, its code, its cannon - paid entrance, men as a conditional source of affection - that dried up the mystery of all things. i had already heard your lies, every instinct knocked up against another layer of mistrust, instead of doves i sent out daggers, they climbed up over your chest, another heart coming to attack its like. i handed my body over to you at your first sign of indifference.
we must be a numerous and coalescent personality, both finding comfort in distance kept, needs masked by seductions we both meant and meant not to make. our intercourse was a calculated accident. my kingdom is the instant, of course i am not its queen, only its citizen,
a couple: a pair of opposition, his entrance, his exit, a passages, a tearing a part, disturbs her, changes her, finds its resting place at the boundary of self/other, where energy soars. i came up the stairs laughing, well oiled with adventure, robed by the allure of penetration;
you - form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress,
me - matter, concave, ground, holding and dumping, ground.
some delicious coat of danger i coated thickly upon your memory, yet from start to finish we both acted out in a way painfully characteristic to our gender; that perversity of sexual difference, logos/pathos,
i the single-focus, schizo-obsessive feminine “u r my 1 + only” and you its foil, the logical, “2 + 2 makes 4” 1,003 lovered don juan. he who relies on a form of love geometry that is true, definite and clear. she with her magical psychosis, her fantasy of continuous union, a way of transforming real into perfectly focused hyper real. both encounter a wild fight, one to and one from reason. for both, real contact is crisis.
i tried to erase it, cut the electronic thread that linked me back to you, 9 - 1 -7, but as hard as a tried, 7- 7- 6 , the numbers began adhering 1 - 5 - 0, adhering to my memory against my will, as i erased i couldn’t forget, 1. i would contact you again, tenuous seductions that would float back to shore unopened, beached on their backs singing “fear, longing, hesitation, disgust.”
you’d tried to erase me, 47, 48, 49, blonde, brunette, red head. each brutal pony tail, each milky bosom, every set of tear stained eyes – she, i, they, we are all girls that haunt you, haunt your i.
afterward, as i lay there in your bed, drunk, air-conditioned, sexually satisfied, like a princess in your castle, you the king sleeping outside by the television in a reclining chair, your thrown. but what if we could close together like 2 spoons, would feminism bite her tongue? i wanted to be the whore, she who would catch a glimpse of man at his worst. but what i remember of your violent basement was the sweet bits – clasping your fingertips to keep my balance, you zipping up my baby doll dress, moments when you appeared vulnerable. blaming would mean confusing my own pathology for yours, holding, hanging on to, keeping – that was my standard. cut off from your attention i needed nothing more then what you had falsely offered and would never, ever, give: intimacy, real or imagined, the keys to the castle.
so like children we waited at the edge of our dream, lips poised to drink at the pleasure pipe, genitals excited by terror. we fed on a mystery, a poison – afraid of dying there. the tragedy of the body is that it will speak the trouble of our souls. it is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. i is never an individual, i is haunted. i is always, before knowing anything, and i-Love-you.
*material printed in italics is taken from selected texts of Helen Cixous
we have acted out the war of everything in a private event. you and i are a structure that is singular and dual, both of us, bound by a double braid. we were enchanted by not-sex calling it “sex,” by not-rape calling it “rape,” by not-love calling it “love.” to tell the truth i trap each element in quotation marks.
i longed to reject “dating,” its trend, its code, its cannon - paid entrance, men as a conditional source of affection - that dried up the mystery of all things. i had already heard your lies, every instinct knocked up against another layer of mistrust, instead of doves i sent out daggers, they climbed up over your chest, another heart coming to attack its like. i handed my body over to you at your first sign of indifference.
we must be a numerous and coalescent personality, both finding comfort in distance kept, needs masked by seductions we both meant and meant not to make. our intercourse was a calculated accident. my kingdom is the instant, of course i am not its queen, only its citizen,
a couple: a pair of opposition, his entrance, his exit, a passages, a tearing a part, disturbs her, changes her, finds its resting place at the boundary of self/other, where energy soars. i came up the stairs laughing, well oiled with adventure, robed by the allure of penetration;
you - form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress,
me - matter, concave, ground, holding and dumping, ground.
some delicious coat of danger i coated thickly upon your memory, yet from start to finish we both acted out in a way painfully characteristic to our gender; that perversity of sexual difference, logos/pathos,
i the single-focus, schizo-obsessive feminine “u r my 1 + only” and you its foil, the logical, “2 + 2 makes 4” 1,003 lovered don juan. he who relies on a form of love geometry that is true, definite and clear. she with her magical psychosis, her fantasy of continuous union, a way of transforming real into perfectly focused hyper real. both encounter a wild fight, one to and one from reason. for both, real contact is crisis.
i tried to erase it, cut the electronic thread that linked me back to you, 9 - 1 -7, but as hard as a tried, 7- 7- 6 , the numbers began adhering 1 - 5 - 0, adhering to my memory against my will, as i erased i couldn’t forget, 1. i would contact you again, tenuous seductions that would float back to shore unopened, beached on their backs singing “fear, longing, hesitation, disgust.”
you’d tried to erase me, 47, 48, 49, blonde, brunette, red head. each brutal pony tail, each milky bosom, every set of tear stained eyes – she, i, they, we are all girls that haunt you, haunt your i.
afterward, as i lay there in your bed, drunk, air-conditioned, sexually satisfied, like a princess in your castle, you the king sleeping outside by the television in a reclining chair, your thrown. but what if we could close together like 2 spoons, would feminism bite her tongue? i wanted to be the whore, she who would catch a glimpse of man at his worst. but what i remember of your violent basement was the sweet bits – clasping your fingertips to keep my balance, you zipping up my baby doll dress, moments when you appeared vulnerable. blaming would mean confusing my own pathology for yours, holding, hanging on to, keeping – that was my standard. cut off from your attention i needed nothing more then what you had falsely offered and would never, ever, give: intimacy, real or imagined, the keys to the castle.
so like children we waited at the edge of our dream, lips poised to drink at the pleasure pipe, genitals excited by terror. we fed on a mystery, a poison – afraid of dying there. the tragedy of the body is that it will speak the trouble of our souls. it is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. i is never an individual, i is haunted. i is always, before knowing anything, and i-Love-you.
*material printed in italics is taken from selected texts of Helen Cixous
Froth of the Champagne
Annabele was a creature of vanity, old demi-monde, froth of the champagne. She was mistress of the drawing room, a high ceiling fortress she stalked day and night, eating minced liver from crystal goblets, stretching her neck to reveal collars of diamonds, purring and screaming in all feline variations, exposing the vocal accessories of her natural triumph. In march, she died. He spent hours at the bathroom sink, running his soft boy hands under warm water, that was the he erased pain. He and she built a bed sheet fort in Annabele’s old home, pushed a queen size bed into its middle and embalmed themselves in bed together indefinitely, surrounding themselves with bowls of funeral lasagna, stolen cough drops, pretty treasures, a complete china tea set filled with chocolate milk. They’d trap each other where their emotional islands had to collide, sleep-talking, using a butter knife to open sympathy notes embossed on bone vellum, filling pillow cases with embroidered poetry, playing patient and nurse, unraveling into their dead cat’s half-world.
It was restful and tender at first, and yet such opulence would eventually make he and she useless and frail, their throats scraped clean by phantom emotions. He and she where lost to some illusory, somnambular duet. Their skin grew milkier, whiter, their temperaments dropped to childlike levels as they alternated crying tantrums, victim to the twilight of the mind, its violent slippages and imagos.
It could have been the end of them, the nightmare counter narrative, lovers frozen in deference to their melancholy, sealed off in a cat coma, sleep encrusted ghost bodies, the contents of their dissonant mutterings rising and falling against limestone walls of a dark, cobwebbed drawing room that no longer heard the soft steps of her paws. It was the easy, pretty way out of life’s glum; it was another quilt of untruths.
Anabelle was a stuffed animal his mother gave him. Finding her again hit some distant, antique chord of a minor elegy still echoing in his heart. Sewn of paisley fabric the color of cream and apricots, she lays there in that childhood picture of him yawning in red pajamas, and now she lays between their two adult bodies in bed each night, a keyhole backward, to fragile boyhood, defenselessness, each night he made his respectful submission. There was no funeral, no collars of diamonds; her death was the myopic fantasy she attached to the slow, gentle saraband they began and ended in his boyhood bedroom in Iowa; sleeping, weeping in triple time, the salt of their eyes staining bed sheets as they tore through old mental caverns, solemnizing their aching past.
Annabelle come to life, their quiet, coup d’etat, each one helping the other to betray an untenable reality. they stayed there in that bed clinging to that stuffed cat, their hearts crying out, composing an anthem, a sepulchral hymn, one rule it sung,
that the world and happiness may be had as a gift – from the mother.
they called it sick, they called it disgusting, they called it by any thing other than what it was. deceit was their wile, an intoxicant, an elixir; it could heal them.
It was restful and tender at first, and yet such opulence would eventually make he and she useless and frail, their throats scraped clean by phantom emotions. He and she where lost to some illusory, somnambular duet. Their skin grew milkier, whiter, their temperaments dropped to childlike levels as they alternated crying tantrums, victim to the twilight of the mind, its violent slippages and imagos.
It could have been the end of them, the nightmare counter narrative, lovers frozen in deference to their melancholy, sealed off in a cat coma, sleep encrusted ghost bodies, the contents of their dissonant mutterings rising and falling against limestone walls of a dark, cobwebbed drawing room that no longer heard the soft steps of her paws. It was the easy, pretty way out of life’s glum; it was another quilt of untruths.
Anabelle was a stuffed animal his mother gave him. Finding her again hit some distant, antique chord of a minor elegy still echoing in his heart. Sewn of paisley fabric the color of cream and apricots, she lays there in that childhood picture of him yawning in red pajamas, and now she lays between their two adult bodies in bed each night, a keyhole backward, to fragile boyhood, defenselessness, each night he made his respectful submission. There was no funeral, no collars of diamonds; her death was the myopic fantasy she attached to the slow, gentle saraband they began and ended in his boyhood bedroom in Iowa; sleeping, weeping in triple time, the salt of their eyes staining bed sheets as they tore through old mental caverns, solemnizing their aching past.
Annabelle come to life, their quiet, coup d’etat, each one helping the other to betray an untenable reality. they stayed there in that bed clinging to that stuffed cat, their hearts crying out, composing an anthem, a sepulchral hymn, one rule it sung,
that the world and happiness may be had as a gift – from the mother.
they called it sick, they called it disgusting, they called it by any thing other than what it was. deceit was their wile, an intoxicant, an elixir; it could heal them.
American Psycho/a
for boyfriend, oh my boyfriend, i love him but he loves someone else and oh how i longed for him and he ignored me and blahblah blahblahblah – god, how boring,
i must confess, it was i who fixed the silken leash around my neck, boyfriend, i who made a mental catalogue of your every desire and whim, do not wear that outfit again. wear a dress, a skirt or something. buy a razor and shave your legs. and high heels, you mention. you like high heels.
my art, it would give the meaning of our separateness value in a visual economy, our affair an interpersonal painting and my body its canvas. patrick asked me, was it all performance? if it was i lost control of it, some retro version of myself took the brush and started painting, turning, swimming around in circles until my mind was your colony and there i was, 22, celebrating my first career successes in the prison of a 19 year old, watching time draw black circles under my eyes.
lying in bed topless in white underwear, newly blonde hair cascading down my shoulders, shaven, mascara running as i read your favorite book and nourished myself through an IV connected to a tank of root beer. i could do nothing else. i had trouble sleeping. one night i awoke in a sweaty, sleepless delirium, grabbed my digital camera and took pictures of myself in front of the mirror, which i emailed to you immediately.
you know, you say, it’s possible to act differently from how one actually feels to get sex, guys. you exploited me in every way possible and when you got bored of it i begged you to do it some more. you were the american psycho and i, i was his girlfriend. though physically my girlfriend is appealing and i wouldn’t mind having sex with her body, the idea of treating her gently, of being a kind date, rubs me the wrong way.
i loved how you withheld attention, your hurling insults, how i’d exhausted myself into a state of anxious, sickening confusion until finally, usually half asleep, you’d draw me close to you, call me girlfriend, and softly touch my hair. your fingers made my body ecstatic, i’d nod, seeming lost in some kind of dream – but enjoying it, oblivious too it, too how you worked. and perhaps that was the point, incompletion encourages pursuit, and nothing rivals the pains and pleasures of infinite pursuit. your void of emotion could best conduct my excesses, and that was my desire, to run through overflowing regions, to cry, to sing, to forever reinvent the passionate carriages that would dip me in and out of the unknown, the convergence-rupture, “he loves me, he loves me not…”
there are no girls with good personalities, you all say in unison, laughing, giving each other high-five. a good personality, you begin, consists of a chick who has a little hard body and will satisfy all sexual demands without being to slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut.
i tattooed your name along my thigh, boyfriend.
“why boyfriend?” the tattoo artist asked, eyeing my thigh lustily as he worked.
“i am reclaiming that which has oppressed me.”
i learned to fight back. filled my super soaker 100xl with my tears and declared war on you; i would break into your house and cuddle you all night. i would tear up, rape, plagiarize and (re)order this text that guides your life.
you claimed you were dead inside, but i had lain my head across your chest, i had heard your heart beat above the whir of the air conditioning, the television; had felt your body heat through the high thread count sheets. i was drawn to you like a leech, the meaning of our difference was like a magnet to me, the secret missing value in the feminist narrative economy, o/a; one last war wound and finally, might the heart stand up to the head?
i want to come over, i’d say in a whiny, little-girl tone, i said this, over and over and over again, with my own voice or any electronic medium that could take the place of it…you ignored me. i kept my purse close to my body always, my whole nervous system attuned to the ring of Nokia, in a constant state of vigilant anticipation for the gentle vibration that would tap at my thigh lightly and confirm your presence, no matter where i went or what i was doing i was always, waiting…
good girl, you’d say before hanging up.
the further i slipped into this love trance the longer the line of good soldiers grew to pull me up out of its sick pit. men proposed to me on the street, choruses of whistles and “you have perfect legs” wafted out of passing cars, dinner dates flooded in from all media units. every time i turned my head there was another man kissing me on the cheek, waiting quietly for that glazed look to fade from my eyes, convinced that it was he - his sweetness and sincerity – that would finally slice through the silken tie that bound me to my oppressor. and yet i just went on, went on loving you, convinced that boyfriend, you and i were meant to heal each other, that we were opposite and equal products of the same powerful disease. that culture, capitalism and xenophobia had caused us each to act out in our own way, that the only way to get around the pain that caused you to act out at others and me to act out at myself was to share it, to speak it, to expose it.
there’s a whole range of behavior that can be expressed in a mannerly way. that’s what civilization is all about – doing it in a mannerly and not antagonistic way. i could dress up you or any pathetic action of my own real pretty in my head. all i remember from that night was the moment you picked me up and twirled me, i remembered it so hard i would lie in bed at night watching over and over the arch my glittery heels made in the night time as your arms whipped my body around in a circle i forgot you had texted me at three o’clock in the morning to pay for your gas riding home from katie's house, the nineteen year old you from the internet. i ran outside to greet you, bought you gas, and groceries, as you led me around the supermarket i asked you why you were so mean to girls, bought you vitamins, rubbed your back and asked you to call me mom. i searched your eyes for any sign of emotion, and when i didn’t find it, i finally understood. you were the kind of person that could have murdered a soul without flinching. it all came down to this: boyfriend you feel like shit but look great.
and then the next day when you texted, “skis! mommy get me skis! please mommy!” i wanted to buy them for you. if i had had the money i would have bought a pair of skis, a role of wrapping paper and a faux x-mas tree. i would have wrapped them up and come over to make you play x-mas morning. i would have done anything to get another hit of you, my boyfriend, my drug.
my last date with M, with misogyny, or perhaps better stated – masochism. i could have married you that night, would have gladly slipped into that fantasy world where i would wear a short violet apron and bake you lavender infused vegan chocolate chip cookies all day long, my razor taped to my fingers so that i might preemptively attack my body at the first sign of hair growth. i, feminism, would marry misogyny and have his babies – squads of blonde sixteen year olds with shaved pussies would parade out of my womb like clockwork each month at the end of my cycle.
because despite how successful, educated, and strong i had become, there will always be this part of me that longs to revert to that prison cell i perfected at the age of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; driving around in my white jeep listening to hip-hop and thinking about boyfriend, eating non-fat dairy dessert i would later puke up in a public restroom. you were proof eras could collapse together, synch up seamlessly above fallen time bridges and enable memory – that balm that could lock and unlock the heart. my career, my life – it were those such matters that terrified me. boyfriend, you were safe. we are strengthened by our weaknesses, our censures. by our lacerations.*
made me, truly, this is what made me,
break me, not a thing’s gonna break me.
that’s my past that made me hot.
here’s my lifelong anthem,
(boyfriend) can’t forget about you.
* elements in italics are taken from Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. french feminist theorist Helen Cixous penned the last quote and the last stanza comes from “Can’t Forget about You” by Nas.
i must confess, it was i who fixed the silken leash around my neck, boyfriend, i who made a mental catalogue of your every desire and whim, do not wear that outfit again. wear a dress, a skirt or something. buy a razor and shave your legs. and high heels, you mention. you like high heels.
my art, it would give the meaning of our separateness value in a visual economy, our affair an interpersonal painting and my body its canvas. patrick asked me, was it all performance? if it was i lost control of it, some retro version of myself took the brush and started painting, turning, swimming around in circles until my mind was your colony and there i was, 22, celebrating my first career successes in the prison of a 19 year old, watching time draw black circles under my eyes.
lying in bed topless in white underwear, newly blonde hair cascading down my shoulders, shaven, mascara running as i read your favorite book and nourished myself through an IV connected to a tank of root beer. i could do nothing else. i had trouble sleeping. one night i awoke in a sweaty, sleepless delirium, grabbed my digital camera and took pictures of myself in front of the mirror, which i emailed to you immediately.
you know, you say, it’s possible to act differently from how one actually feels to get sex, guys. you exploited me in every way possible and when you got bored of it i begged you to do it some more. you were the american psycho and i, i was his girlfriend. though physically my girlfriend is appealing and i wouldn’t mind having sex with her body, the idea of treating her gently, of being a kind date, rubs me the wrong way.
i loved how you withheld attention, your hurling insults, how i’d exhausted myself into a state of anxious, sickening confusion until finally, usually half asleep, you’d draw me close to you, call me girlfriend, and softly touch my hair. your fingers made my body ecstatic, i’d nod, seeming lost in some kind of dream – but enjoying it, oblivious too it, too how you worked. and perhaps that was the point, incompletion encourages pursuit, and nothing rivals the pains and pleasures of infinite pursuit. your void of emotion could best conduct my excesses, and that was my desire, to run through overflowing regions, to cry, to sing, to forever reinvent the passionate carriages that would dip me in and out of the unknown, the convergence-rupture, “he loves me, he loves me not…”
there are no girls with good personalities, you all say in unison, laughing, giving each other high-five. a good personality, you begin, consists of a chick who has a little hard body and will satisfy all sexual demands without being to slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut.
i tattooed your name along my thigh, boyfriend.
“why boyfriend?” the tattoo artist asked, eyeing my thigh lustily as he worked.
“i am reclaiming that which has oppressed me.”
i learned to fight back. filled my super soaker 100xl with my tears and declared war on you; i would break into your house and cuddle you all night. i would tear up, rape, plagiarize and (re)order this text that guides your life.
you claimed you were dead inside, but i had lain my head across your chest, i had heard your heart beat above the whir of the air conditioning, the television; had felt your body heat through the high thread count sheets. i was drawn to you like a leech, the meaning of our difference was like a magnet to me, the secret missing value in the feminist narrative economy, o/a; one last war wound and finally, might the heart stand up to the head?
i want to come over, i’d say in a whiny, little-girl tone, i said this, over and over and over again, with my own voice or any electronic medium that could take the place of it…you ignored me. i kept my purse close to my body always, my whole nervous system attuned to the ring of Nokia, in a constant state of vigilant anticipation for the gentle vibration that would tap at my thigh lightly and confirm your presence, no matter where i went or what i was doing i was always, waiting…
good girl, you’d say before hanging up.
the further i slipped into this love trance the longer the line of good soldiers grew to pull me up out of its sick pit. men proposed to me on the street, choruses of whistles and “you have perfect legs” wafted out of passing cars, dinner dates flooded in from all media units. every time i turned my head there was another man kissing me on the cheek, waiting quietly for that glazed look to fade from my eyes, convinced that it was he - his sweetness and sincerity – that would finally slice through the silken tie that bound me to my oppressor. and yet i just went on, went on loving you, convinced that boyfriend, you and i were meant to heal each other, that we were opposite and equal products of the same powerful disease. that culture, capitalism and xenophobia had caused us each to act out in our own way, that the only way to get around the pain that caused you to act out at others and me to act out at myself was to share it, to speak it, to expose it.
there’s a whole range of behavior that can be expressed in a mannerly way. that’s what civilization is all about – doing it in a mannerly and not antagonistic way. i could dress up you or any pathetic action of my own real pretty in my head. all i remember from that night was the moment you picked me up and twirled me, i remembered it so hard i would lie in bed at night watching over and over the arch my glittery heels made in the night time as your arms whipped my body around in a circle i forgot you had texted me at three o’clock in the morning to pay for your gas riding home from katie's house, the nineteen year old you from the internet. i ran outside to greet you, bought you gas, and groceries, as you led me around the supermarket i asked you why you were so mean to girls, bought you vitamins, rubbed your back and asked you to call me mom. i searched your eyes for any sign of emotion, and when i didn’t find it, i finally understood. you were the kind of person that could have murdered a soul without flinching. it all came down to this: boyfriend you feel like shit but look great.
and then the next day when you texted, “skis! mommy get me skis! please mommy!” i wanted to buy them for you. if i had had the money i would have bought a pair of skis, a role of wrapping paper and a faux x-mas tree. i would have wrapped them up and come over to make you play x-mas morning. i would have done anything to get another hit of you, my boyfriend, my drug.
my last date with M, with misogyny, or perhaps better stated – masochism. i could have married you that night, would have gladly slipped into that fantasy world where i would wear a short violet apron and bake you lavender infused vegan chocolate chip cookies all day long, my razor taped to my fingers so that i might preemptively attack my body at the first sign of hair growth. i, feminism, would marry misogyny and have his babies – squads of blonde sixteen year olds with shaved pussies would parade out of my womb like clockwork each month at the end of my cycle.
because despite how successful, educated, and strong i had become, there will always be this part of me that longs to revert to that prison cell i perfected at the age of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; driving around in my white jeep listening to hip-hop and thinking about boyfriend, eating non-fat dairy dessert i would later puke up in a public restroom. you were proof eras could collapse together, synch up seamlessly above fallen time bridges and enable memory – that balm that could lock and unlock the heart. my career, my life – it were those such matters that terrified me. boyfriend, you were safe. we are strengthened by our weaknesses, our censures. by our lacerations.*
made me, truly, this is what made me,
break me, not a thing’s gonna break me.
that’s my past that made me hot.
here’s my lifelong anthem,
(boyfriend) can’t forget about you.
* elements in italics are taken from Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. french feminist theorist Helen Cixous penned the last quote and the last stanza comes from “Can’t Forget about You” by Nas.
Heartbreak Diet
heartbreak diet
4:41 minute vocal recording over found mix tape*
pollen is the trace that “dirties” the petals of the flower, it is a stain that is “both original cause and remedy,” and flowers are seductive because they are so stained (1).
not being loved by him, would be completely overwhelming. so she represses this pain. this does not mean that her unfulfilled love need disappears, however. it continues throughout her day exerting its force; its sensations leaking through the heart’s veins to an area where greater control or relief can be solicited.
once her needs have been suppressed by the conscious mind, she is free to pursue substitute gratification, a coping strategy: symbolic behavior in defense against excessive psychobiologic pain that is self-perpetuating; symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs.
although his absence hurt her, she loved how neither of them could escape their animal nature; that intimacy would cause each their own flight – his to and hers from reason. she thinking, “you are my 1 and only” and he “2 and 2 makes 4.” capitalism provides her with symbolic substitutions, an opportunity for neurotic sublimation, “[he] will write her a symphony, just to say how much [she] means to [him].” she presses repeat, that seamless wave of sound is the fantasy she identifies with to escape her desire (to escape is to control it). when these symbolic satisfactions fail to fulfill real needs, the neurosis self-perpetuates. neurosis being the pathology of feeling - in order for real needs to be satisfied, they must be felt and experienced. once her needs are met, she will experience her body and her environment. as long as the state of desire for him persists in the unconscious, she is temporarily more unreal than real, and at this critical point we may judge her to be neurotic.
anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. she performs this ritual rapidly, over consuming the object fulfilling her false need and purging it rapidly (in ears →out throat). despite their submission to the laws of efficiency produced by homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest, a stain (her recorded scream); residue that builds up as heterogeneous threat on the public surface she will enter and scar.
she loses her head, because in her there is an inherent need for loss, for dépense; for unproductive expenditures. so she spills like that, unto a used tape whose status as an anachronism has left its surface unguarded and unsealed. she lays her excrement over what was already there as if sound were mattress, time’s corporeal pressure singing dissonantly with her voice.
and it is this vocal waste that suggests her resolute value: dirty, loud, base. there will always be things coming out of her mouth she cannot control. yet it is this waste (crescendo→ decrescendo), the stain of her delayed satisfaction, that is also siren, both cause and remedy of her unfulfilled need. eventually this sound would find the ears of him, her need, and demonstrate its seductive qualities as lure.
*Copies of this work may be obtained by contacting the artist. This piece was reproduced in August of 2009 on LeRoy Steven's limited edition LP "Favorite Recorded Scream" on Small World
1. Themes in this text are taken from two works by Bataille, Georges: “Language of Flowers” 1927-1939 and Dépense (Theory of Loss).
4:41 minute vocal recording over found mix tape*
pollen is the trace that “dirties” the petals of the flower, it is a stain that is “both original cause and remedy,” and flowers are seductive because they are so stained (1).
not being loved by him, would be completely overwhelming. so she represses this pain. this does not mean that her unfulfilled love need disappears, however. it continues throughout her day exerting its force; its sensations leaking through the heart’s veins to an area where greater control or relief can be solicited.
once her needs have been suppressed by the conscious mind, she is free to pursue substitute gratification, a coping strategy: symbolic behavior in defense against excessive psychobiologic pain that is self-perpetuating; symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs.
although his absence hurt her, she loved how neither of them could escape their animal nature; that intimacy would cause each their own flight – his to and hers from reason. she thinking, “you are my 1 and only” and he “2 and 2 makes 4.” capitalism provides her with symbolic substitutions, an opportunity for neurotic sublimation, “[he] will write her a symphony, just to say how much [she] means to [him].” she presses repeat, that seamless wave of sound is the fantasy she identifies with to escape her desire (to escape is to control it). when these symbolic satisfactions fail to fulfill real needs, the neurosis self-perpetuates. neurosis being the pathology of feeling - in order for real needs to be satisfied, they must be felt and experienced. once her needs are met, she will experience her body and her environment. as long as the state of desire for him persists in the unconscious, she is temporarily more unreal than real, and at this critical point we may judge her to be neurotic.
anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. she performs this ritual rapidly, over consuming the object fulfilling her false need and purging it rapidly (in ears →out throat). despite their submission to the laws of efficiency produced by homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest, a stain (her recorded scream); residue that builds up as heterogeneous threat on the public surface she will enter and scar.
she loses her head, because in her there is an inherent need for loss, for dépense; for unproductive expenditures. so she spills like that, unto a used tape whose status as an anachronism has left its surface unguarded and unsealed. she lays her excrement over what was already there as if sound were mattress, time’s corporeal pressure singing dissonantly with her voice.
and it is this vocal waste that suggests her resolute value: dirty, loud, base. there will always be things coming out of her mouth she cannot control. yet it is this waste (crescendo→ decrescendo), the stain of her delayed satisfaction, that is also siren, both cause and remedy of her unfulfilled need. eventually this sound would find the ears of him, her need, and demonstrate its seductive qualities as lure.
*Copies of this work may be obtained by contacting the artist. This piece was reproduced in August of 2009 on LeRoy Steven's limited edition LP "Favorite Recorded Scream" on Small World
1. Themes in this text are taken from two works by Bataille, Georges: “Language of Flowers” 1927-1939 and Dépense (Theory of Loss).
Beach Party!
boy, you’re like a dream-state beach party: rows of taught bodies soaked in tanning oil, eyes tracing cloud constellations and collar bones painted in sunbeam. ice chests full of candy, beer and glo-sticks. all toes licked with sea foam.
every beach party is different, sunbeams vary in color and temperature, clothing trends vary, tides change. one day it’s beer, popsicles, jelly slip-ones and culottes. the next it’s cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, white Frisbees and boy cut shorts. once we came in black war paint, listened to death metal and humped until we were sweaty. we wore shades so we didn’t have to looked at each other’s eyes, a tv set blocked the ocean and it played X-Men III. lined up in a row along the water like an army of white slugs, our wrists pierced by iv tubes, chains, together they made a fan shape of lines that connecting us back to the cold metal box in the beach parking lot marked “pleasure.”
the moment i saw you i was putting on my flip-flops and bounding down to the beach like an Olympic athlete. he blind folded me and fed me with sunlight so strong i couldn’t see straight. in the morning i woke up half dead on the rocks, water logged and blue in the face, my mouth stuffed with seaweed and candy. i spent days nursing myself back to health, lying in bed with a linen towel and a bowl of lavender water, my whole body covered in cold cream to sooth what had been burned. it’s been a long time, but you keep coming back to taunt me. every once in a while, when i least expect it, you’ll turn to me and whisper slowly, “come back to beach party.”
leave first, i tell myself, but i always stay too long. the others have packed up. the mothers left early to beat traffic, burdened by stacks of towels and coolers dripping with condensation, with romance novels tucked into the back of their short shorts they drag whiny children with bright red noses back to the car by force. the couples who went rollerblading in matching Dockers linger past sunset, and then leave arm in arm to make dinner reservations where they will wear white cloth napkins and eat lobster. the vendors pack up at six sharp. even Malibu Jane, who sat there all day in her Channel suit, lathering herself in oil with robotic grace, has gathered together her pink towel set and left. she, bronze sun-slave statuette, iconic beach-party Madonna whose beauty and predictability is the one constant of the shoreline, has indicated last call.
we sat there in sand throwns like Ken and Barbie, and yet, you were an honest lover, you whispered, “this isn’t real. they put die in the water to make it so blue, and real sand is made from glass, not sugar. that puddle of melted ice cream is actually Malibu Jane’s vomit.” you were a selfish drug. i spent hours with you, until i was sick with like, until i was sitting in the sand, leeched of my autonomy and strength, a sun-kissed mermaid in like-trance cooing, “please never leave.” my skin is thicker now, like yours. i leave a trail of bread crumbs to help me find my way back to the car, and bring a towel to protect the car’s upholstery. we brought sunscreen and life jackets. i kept a few mementos: there is taffy stuck in my teeth and a light dusting of pink on my chest, there are crumbs of sand at the bottom of my bed i let shake off my feet. once the spell broke, you were gone and instead of needing you more i needed you less. it’s the difference between being guarded and careful. the difference between wearing sunglasses to protect your heart and taking off your sunglasses to look someone in the eye and say “i like you, today.” which isn’t a promise, it’s a party.
every beach party is different, sunbeams vary in color and temperature, clothing trends vary, tides change. one day it’s beer, popsicles, jelly slip-ones and culottes. the next it’s cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, white Frisbees and boy cut shorts. once we came in black war paint, listened to death metal and humped until we were sweaty. we wore shades so we didn’t have to looked at each other’s eyes, a tv set blocked the ocean and it played X-Men III. lined up in a row along the water like an army of white slugs, our wrists pierced by iv tubes, chains, together they made a fan shape of lines that connecting us back to the cold metal box in the beach parking lot marked “pleasure.”
the moment i saw you i was putting on my flip-flops and bounding down to the beach like an Olympic athlete. he blind folded me and fed me with sunlight so strong i couldn’t see straight. in the morning i woke up half dead on the rocks, water logged and blue in the face, my mouth stuffed with seaweed and candy. i spent days nursing myself back to health, lying in bed with a linen towel and a bowl of lavender water, my whole body covered in cold cream to sooth what had been burned. it’s been a long time, but you keep coming back to taunt me. every once in a while, when i least expect it, you’ll turn to me and whisper slowly, “come back to beach party.”
leave first, i tell myself, but i always stay too long. the others have packed up. the mothers left early to beat traffic, burdened by stacks of towels and coolers dripping with condensation, with romance novels tucked into the back of their short shorts they drag whiny children with bright red noses back to the car by force. the couples who went rollerblading in matching Dockers linger past sunset, and then leave arm in arm to make dinner reservations where they will wear white cloth napkins and eat lobster. the vendors pack up at six sharp. even Malibu Jane, who sat there all day in her Channel suit, lathering herself in oil with robotic grace, has gathered together her pink towel set and left. she, bronze sun-slave statuette, iconic beach-party Madonna whose beauty and predictability is the one constant of the shoreline, has indicated last call.
we sat there in sand throwns like Ken and Barbie, and yet, you were an honest lover, you whispered, “this isn’t real. they put die in the water to make it so blue, and real sand is made from glass, not sugar. that puddle of melted ice cream is actually Malibu Jane’s vomit.” you were a selfish drug. i spent hours with you, until i was sick with like, until i was sitting in the sand, leeched of my autonomy and strength, a sun-kissed mermaid in like-trance cooing, “please never leave.” my skin is thicker now, like yours. i leave a trail of bread crumbs to help me find my way back to the car, and bring a towel to protect the car’s upholstery. we brought sunscreen and life jackets. i kept a few mementos: there is taffy stuck in my teeth and a light dusting of pink on my chest, there are crumbs of sand at the bottom of my bed i let shake off my feet. once the spell broke, you were gone and instead of needing you more i needed you less. it’s the difference between being guarded and careful. the difference between wearing sunglasses to protect your heart and taking off your sunglasses to look someone in the eye and say “i like you, today.” which isn’t a promise, it’s a party.
Electrical Lasso
when i was 19 my mother sent me to her british psychic. he told me that i would finally have real partnership at the age of 23. i waited for it, my secret onus, patiently, impatiently, burning through casual liaisons that would pall upon my emotional health. that birthday finally crept up on me, you crept up on me. true-blue, singing, blooming right under my nose, hidden beneath our clever cabal; hitting, hair pulling, ignoring, 1, 2, 3, 4 hours into the train ride, until sunset, when you stopped being mean and we grew into a charmed circle of arms, the cold night folding over and forcing felicity upon us.
in the months, weeks, days and hours leading up to our train’s departure, my personal life was at its most deleterious. atrophy set in, i became a glittering, auxiliary version of myself led along a leash of illusory highs. we stayed in contact by text, a courtship that should have taken months, was a landscape technology had us bulldoze through. in an feverish attempt to slow down our correspondence, i mailed a package to your apartment on magnolia street. i filled a caboodle with hair, sprinkles, a scented letter, autographed photo of Madonna, religious porcelain statuette, x-rated photos, 1997 recording of my mother and i singing ave maria, and 200 dollars cash marked “jess’s trip fund” in pink felt tip marker. (the package, which you never received, is currently in an unknown location somewhere between brooklyn and jersey). i turned to dancing and gambling, carbohydrates, alone or with fair-weather friends, keeping your sweet language near me always with an electrical lasso,
Ruin me.
5:12am 11/04/2007
there was something so dark and something so childlike in my minor pleasures, anointing my flesh with lavender oil in ceremonial vanity, fake eyelashes and chunky earrings, my sweet tours, restaurant bills for twelve biscuits, 6 macaroons, and 3 shirley temples. using candy to seize control of my dwindling serotonin, forgetting over and over how each new tragedy originated in myself, in denial of each pain, each burgeoning sequela. the wild array of men i meanwhile courted, hunted; finally mature, my heart brittle. fantasy was my bulwark in the bloody war i pledged to fight like a boy. on my last night in bulimia, my private food paradise, half of me vanished, a drunken, blue-eyed naïf tumbled out of the men’s bathroom in my place, a french hipster and a lusty virus clinging to her like sickly appendages.
i might have, like so many disreputable girls, re-steered, re-entered ‘the paths of respectability,’ taken a pew in a parish church, prolonging my life by several years, so that i might die in an odor of sanctity; but notwithstanding my mutinous core, my very nature revolted at such self-exile. i fashioned a safety valve: a distorted, sexy violence of a memory, established what was dark as present and real. french hsv2 became my purple heart.
we took jobs in carlisle and santa rosa, alternating between our parent’s households, between our of quadrangle names. my mother’s, my father’s, your mother’s, your father’s, letting the household odors meddle and mix, seep back into our skins where they once settled. my father’s new house with his girlfriend smelled like laundry detergent, my mother’s like organic flowers and silk; the key to each’s door still fit into the other’s lock.
as little as i called you by it, the residua of your real name never relinquished, it staid, ruled over you in each locale like an invisible axis; gav and jess, ben and jess, gavin and katie, katie and ben; my mind darted back and forth through each gateway, lying, leaking out a purer substance if not from what i called you by my lips then by that which i called you in my heart.
because she is the most colossal endangerment she demands from a man his most, and if he has it in him she will receive it.
i cried at regular intervals, the veneer of composure i acted our effortlessly for the company of everyone dissolved around you. these tremors, violent slippages of my quicksilver temper, the horror of their transference unto you elucidated like never before the true dimensions of my routine stumbles, when chocolate mochas, puddings and cakes tumbled me down dark and swollen interior cavities, conscious of my collapse, my higher self observing quietly but helpless to saccharin’s suasive hold. you’d brush my hair softly, whisper, greet me with your eyes when i managed to peak out from behind the veil of my weeping. i had seen this disease in my relatives, in yours, this disease of satiety and dependence. this knowing engendered a soliloquy for one of my possible future selves: she was a shriveled snake of a woman, gaudily dressed, impish and lonely, using a meter to measure blood sugar, effacing herself by the substance that bestowed her first and last pleasure.
when we could, we stole more than names: nylons, medicine, razors, film, diet soda, underwear, batteries, shaving cream, tea, pop tarts. pious living could never deliver the hazard we craved for. you calculated the duration of time we took back for living relative to the cost of each item and our working wage. 1 box of pop tarts equaled .36 hour roller-skating. 1 package of Polaroid film equaled 2 hours drinking stolen champagne huddled under the bridge. we cared less about temporal freedom than breaching that cloak of fear that entraps and limits, that sizzling cattle rod we observed guide venal, tired bodies along the strip in Las Vegas, herd them neatly from one bright light to the next, the brightest, loudest bell, the best, in perpetual spending.
there is an invisible fee we pay to keep civilization hungry & profitable; all the while a moral violence is acted out upon us. like an opiate, conformity and obedience bear forged pleasure, convince us fear is safety and meanwhile, conceal what is a much greater theft.
in the months, weeks, days and hours leading up to our train’s departure, my personal life was at its most deleterious. atrophy set in, i became a glittering, auxiliary version of myself led along a leash of illusory highs. we stayed in contact by text, a courtship that should have taken months, was a landscape technology had us bulldoze through. in an feverish attempt to slow down our correspondence, i mailed a package to your apartment on magnolia street. i filled a caboodle with hair, sprinkles, a scented letter, autographed photo of Madonna, religious porcelain statuette, x-rated photos, 1997 recording of my mother and i singing ave maria, and 200 dollars cash marked “jess’s trip fund” in pink felt tip marker. (the package, which you never received, is currently in an unknown location somewhere between brooklyn and jersey). i turned to dancing and gambling, carbohydrates, alone or with fair-weather friends, keeping your sweet language near me always with an electrical lasso,
Ruin me.
5:12am 11/04/2007
there was something so dark and something so childlike in my minor pleasures, anointing my flesh with lavender oil in ceremonial vanity, fake eyelashes and chunky earrings, my sweet tours, restaurant bills for twelve biscuits, 6 macaroons, and 3 shirley temples. using candy to seize control of my dwindling serotonin, forgetting over and over how each new tragedy originated in myself, in denial of each pain, each burgeoning sequela. the wild array of men i meanwhile courted, hunted; finally mature, my heart brittle. fantasy was my bulwark in the bloody war i pledged to fight like a boy. on my last night in bulimia, my private food paradise, half of me vanished, a drunken, blue-eyed naïf tumbled out of the men’s bathroom in my place, a french hipster and a lusty virus clinging to her like sickly appendages.
i might have, like so many disreputable girls, re-steered, re-entered ‘the paths of respectability,’ taken a pew in a parish church, prolonging my life by several years, so that i might die in an odor of sanctity; but notwithstanding my mutinous core, my very nature revolted at such self-exile. i fashioned a safety valve: a distorted, sexy violence of a memory, established what was dark as present and real. french hsv2 became my purple heart.
we took jobs in carlisle and santa rosa, alternating between our parent’s households, between our of quadrangle names. my mother’s, my father’s, your mother’s, your father’s, letting the household odors meddle and mix, seep back into our skins where they once settled. my father’s new house with his girlfriend smelled like laundry detergent, my mother’s like organic flowers and silk; the key to each’s door still fit into the other’s lock.
as little as i called you by it, the residua of your real name never relinquished, it staid, ruled over you in each locale like an invisible axis; gav and jess, ben and jess, gavin and katie, katie and ben; my mind darted back and forth through each gateway, lying, leaking out a purer substance if not from what i called you by my lips then by that which i called you in my heart.
because she is the most colossal endangerment she demands from a man his most, and if he has it in him she will receive it.
i cried at regular intervals, the veneer of composure i acted our effortlessly for the company of everyone dissolved around you. these tremors, violent slippages of my quicksilver temper, the horror of their transference unto you elucidated like never before the true dimensions of my routine stumbles, when chocolate mochas, puddings and cakes tumbled me down dark and swollen interior cavities, conscious of my collapse, my higher self observing quietly but helpless to saccharin’s suasive hold. you’d brush my hair softly, whisper, greet me with your eyes when i managed to peak out from behind the veil of my weeping. i had seen this disease in my relatives, in yours, this disease of satiety and dependence. this knowing engendered a soliloquy for one of my possible future selves: she was a shriveled snake of a woman, gaudily dressed, impish and lonely, using a meter to measure blood sugar, effacing herself by the substance that bestowed her first and last pleasure.
when we could, we stole more than names: nylons, medicine, razors, film, diet soda, underwear, batteries, shaving cream, tea, pop tarts. pious living could never deliver the hazard we craved for. you calculated the duration of time we took back for living relative to the cost of each item and our working wage. 1 box of pop tarts equaled .36 hour roller-skating. 1 package of Polaroid film equaled 2 hours drinking stolen champagne huddled under the bridge. we cared less about temporal freedom than breaching that cloak of fear that entraps and limits, that sizzling cattle rod we observed guide venal, tired bodies along the strip in Las Vegas, herd them neatly from one bright light to the next, the brightest, loudest bell, the best, in perpetual spending.
there is an invisible fee we pay to keep civilization hungry & profitable; all the while a moral violence is acted out upon us. like an opiate, conformity and obedience bear forged pleasure, convince us fear is safety and meanwhile, conceal what is a much greater theft.
the Lazaretto
siege – v.
1. the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.
He pretended to be Gavin, the meanest boy she had shared a bed with, and she pretended back. They pretended so hard their fictions grew into truths. he named her Jess after the only girl that had ever broken his heart. Because they knew, as well as you know, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other, and she felt his gesture in her blood.
The renascent strength of their game of nom de guerres, of Gav & Jess Baby, girlfriend and boyfriend drag, love stalking-horse. This mythomanic tunnel which would eventually squeeze, push, shoot them out its mouth into a cushioned, inoculative domestic life.
There must be some repository in each of us, an iron sacristy guarded by a mental keeper. when our defense is weak, when a lacuna smears one’s tight, glossy exterior, when one’s keeper sleeps - the contents of these compartments slip out, to haunt us.
In times past, during periods of quarantine, authorities built city lazarettos– buildings or ships used to house the infected, the poor, the offal social detritus who were kept separate. We do this too, we wall off puerile thoughts, puerile words. Hearts that might gleam bright with exclamations become weighted down by silent tenebrous coatings, armature which holds us in bondage to our dear cloacal secrets.
There were periods when the thought of death and afterlife and its sweet consoling song overcame each of them, they might have relinquished themselves to it, to the reign of this consuming sorrow- had not they found these multiple exit routes, these frissures, eventually Life would push them through each of pain’s gates (1).
She liked his mother, liked the branches laid out on the carpet arranged against the faded stuffed animals and magic rocks. She liked the way a woman could live off of whiskey, welfare, and watered down milk; the way that his mother’s greatest success was her greatest failure. What they all shared was a disregard for, even disbelief in, prevailing psychosocial illusions. They cared not that the routines they replaced these illusions with were equally fictional, but only that they were their own. The fruit they bare upon this world was fancy, the appearance of the permanent satisfaction of psychic needs.
They didn’t pretend to be Gav and Jess to her, he insisted his mother could see right through any lie; and she could. His mother recounted their whole trip in a matter of seconds without asking a single question. Everyone else demanded facts, empirical data – miles traveled, routes used, food consumed, possessions acquired – his mother described it, the aura that hung around them, what they set out to accomplish in their hearts.
As Gav & Jess they conducted the carnal anarchy worthy of starveling, swilling beasts, pushing those offal bits up and out the rictus using liquor and drugs to grease their shoots. It was this liquid subterfuge, this wild, wet, mental conflagration, it made them let out locked facts; escape with moonlit celerity the social composure enforced to prohibit any deviation.
His ulterior, soberer route was designed by her, his inamorata, her arrow through his lachrymose heart, pierce, rupture, his secrets rushing out by way of a welter - rolling, tossing, his uncensored self heaving true sentiments off as if waves of the sea. She his interlocutor, making her fracture upon his boyish swathe, a smooth, thick crack in his case, his lazaretto opening and spilling out all those sharp, rhapsodic effluvia. Pushing, and pulling, until
He is loved, he is besieged.
It was through these episodes that they learned to bow down at the gates of these lazarettos, to make that painful genuflection because they knew, above all else, it was this structure and its contents which had all power over them, which they might blast and attack, dipping back into its rubble as a well -
Drinking up their new proud redemption from its depths.
1. material taken from Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence (1913)
1. the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.
He pretended to be Gavin, the meanest boy she had shared a bed with, and she pretended back. They pretended so hard their fictions grew into truths. he named her Jess after the only girl that had ever broken his heart. Because they knew, as well as you know, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other, and she felt his gesture in her blood.
The renascent strength of their game of nom de guerres, of Gav & Jess Baby, girlfriend and boyfriend drag, love stalking-horse. This mythomanic tunnel which would eventually squeeze, push, shoot them out its mouth into a cushioned, inoculative domestic life.
There must be some repository in each of us, an iron sacristy guarded by a mental keeper. when our defense is weak, when a lacuna smears one’s tight, glossy exterior, when one’s keeper sleeps - the contents of these compartments slip out, to haunt us.
In times past, during periods of quarantine, authorities built city lazarettos– buildings or ships used to house the infected, the poor, the offal social detritus who were kept separate. We do this too, we wall off puerile thoughts, puerile words. Hearts that might gleam bright with exclamations become weighted down by silent tenebrous coatings, armature which holds us in bondage to our dear cloacal secrets.
There were periods when the thought of death and afterlife and its sweet consoling song overcame each of them, they might have relinquished themselves to it, to the reign of this consuming sorrow- had not they found these multiple exit routes, these frissures, eventually Life would push them through each of pain’s gates (1).
She liked his mother, liked the branches laid out on the carpet arranged against the faded stuffed animals and magic rocks. She liked the way a woman could live off of whiskey, welfare, and watered down milk; the way that his mother’s greatest success was her greatest failure. What they all shared was a disregard for, even disbelief in, prevailing psychosocial illusions. They cared not that the routines they replaced these illusions with were equally fictional, but only that they were their own. The fruit they bare upon this world was fancy, the appearance of the permanent satisfaction of psychic needs.
They didn’t pretend to be Gav and Jess to her, he insisted his mother could see right through any lie; and she could. His mother recounted their whole trip in a matter of seconds without asking a single question. Everyone else demanded facts, empirical data – miles traveled, routes used, food consumed, possessions acquired – his mother described it, the aura that hung around them, what they set out to accomplish in their hearts.
As Gav & Jess they conducted the carnal anarchy worthy of starveling, swilling beasts, pushing those offal bits up and out the rictus using liquor and drugs to grease their shoots. It was this liquid subterfuge, this wild, wet, mental conflagration, it made them let out locked facts; escape with moonlit celerity the social composure enforced to prohibit any deviation.
His ulterior, soberer route was designed by her, his inamorata, her arrow through his lachrymose heart, pierce, rupture, his secrets rushing out by way of a welter - rolling, tossing, his uncensored self heaving true sentiments off as if waves of the sea. She his interlocutor, making her fracture upon his boyish swathe, a smooth, thick crack in his case, his lazaretto opening and spilling out all those sharp, rhapsodic effluvia. Pushing, and pulling, until
He is loved, he is besieged.
It was through these episodes that they learned to bow down at the gates of these lazarettos, to make that painful genuflection because they knew, above all else, it was this structure and its contents which had all power over them, which they might blast and attack, dipping back into its rubble as a well -
Drinking up their new proud redemption from its depths.
1. material taken from Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence (1913)
Sugar, the Swan That Sings When She is Dying
No memory is concrete, each will leak, each will crack, each will put forth one empty slice, a lacuna one must fill up with some other substance: ribbons, sand, wax, sugar, imagination.
She is home in young adulthood, sitting in the doctor’s office. She has a nasty rash.
There was a park behind her the house she grew up in where the boys and she would play war. Her brother, her, the neighbor boys – launching themselves over the balcony like smoke bombs, riding over stomachs on her bicycle, taking hostages. Morad lived next store, an Iranian boy, his Arabic name meant desire. He was her very favorite, she’d hold him hostage by the throat in the playhouse for hours, her soft girl fingers pressing into his neck as she whispered, “caught you again.” Because outside she always caught him, she was faster, stronger and quicker than he, it was she that cast her shadow over him.
Things changed when they went back indoors, when it became too hot or cold or dark in the park and she moved with him to that warming, domestic space. During this transition he led, and she went willingly. He’d bring her inside, lead her to the kitchen and reach into his mother’s box of sugar cubes. They’d eat them together, secretly, as many as would not be missed by the adults. Lying in his bed, she’d be still like a doll in slumber, and he’d make silent obedience to his own desires.
Is she having trouble standing on her own two feet in this world?
Morad was gone, years had past, she was still strong in the world, still eating lumps of sugar because one boy had cut so deeply into her chemistry, forming her girlish pleasure receptors. There it was, spreading in her stomach, like ivy snaking through her digestive tract, lining her caverns of pink flesh with a thick chalk; an infection weakening her muscles, fueled by sweets, or, her young desire, that perfect drug.
The public and the private, two obstacles which created such different urges in her, where in public she was driven to action - fighting, kicking, claiming - and in private, into submission and dependency.
They gave her antibiotics for the rash, for the itch, for that tight gut. She lay in those white hospital beds and swallowed those little lumps of white, round solid pills from her male doctors. Like the sugar cubes, they further aggravated the white storm growing in her belly. The only thing that could starve off this bacteria was not eating it, not eating sugar, she had to find another route. Her anger fueled her like nothing else could. Each time she resisted she felt that she was fighting like a girl again, and holding her desire hostage.
How long must I resist these pleasures? She thought. She could eat so much sugar, until her tears, urine, sweat tasted sweet and good. It came back out of her in yeasty form, nice smelling, pastier, it made constellations on the base of her underwear.
To be swept off her feet by him – she thought about this incessantly. What conventional fantasy, so many times unwrapped, dismantled, deconstructed, long tainted by strong feminist clichés – weakness, passivity, complacency, hegemony. But in her sugar-coma, cerebral resistance knocked right out of her. She was overcome by the pleasure of sugar’s sensation - lightness, ease, safety, the sunbeam that moves slowly covering sidewalk, wall, edges, center, periphery; she, peeling back lazily, like a flower opening.
And then she became so feminine, cried more, sung. She had just enough energy to bustle around the kitchen in her apron, restocking the sugar box and pouring glasses of milk, and then eventually, losing all her energy, she was softly, merrily supine, her stomach rising to meet the arches of his tracing fingertips, once she trusted that they’d always be there.
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