Ecstasy, ecstasy, the pleasure of being seen
I know you reminisce, and fantasize, on what is, what was, and what could have been.
I wanted to tell you about someone whose thoughts I occupy but I couldn’t find the right words. So I thought of those I no longer speak to that watch my every move. I wondered: are they impressed? Or sneering at my shadow? I know I can never know and if I could I wouldn’t want to. Interpretation is imperialistic destruction, re-appropriation. And as an artist I’m not supposed to understand, only implement and execute or pain of deliria.
With eyes poured over me I purr like a panther. Or instead like a dog foaming at the mouth over a steak just out of reach. The night holds me in its cradle and colors me indigo, amber, jasper and jade. Have you ever dared to dance in the middle of the crowd with your eyes closed, arms up, your lips parted slightly open? Notice when you flicker up your lids and lashes how many heads turn away in that precise moment as if out of fear; also how many remain, terribly transfixed. Now you’re being seen. Now when you go to the bar if you listen close you’ll hear whispers and wonder passing by. To be is to die as it is to create yourself, an authentic auteur approach, where there is only your experience and others’ experience of it and you have no control over the repulsion or the love or the extent of any of it. Mostly, to be, we have to focus on the smaller things: the killings, and the fabricated motives of them, and the tilling of the soil. Taxes. Life is fertile with illusions. And senseless moods and mundanities, which, should we will it hard enough, have their own cerise allure.
We’re ascending, you and I, if you let me take your hand in mine and go behind the Veil. Artaud’s total abyss: we as actors are seen through a crystalline lens but we are the only true witness to the totality of feeling in our exalted state of extremes. We’re telling our story with each story we tell. Death can’t touch us here. To really dive into the depths you have to make a myth out of yourself, create a title and follow a disciplined practice and never let up. Keep pushing and you’ll get there soon. The breathlessness, the heart hammering against its cell, the knowing: Someone, somewhere, is watching, their breath taken away, too. That’s who we do it for! The young and the old, thirsty for inspiration, for shock, everyone wants to lose themselves in someone else!
Self-romanticism, Neo-transcendentalism. I love my luxury and my leisure and all the mist obscuring the truth of me. I confessed to P. the other night how much I relish being in the spotlight. I couldn’t help it, I let out a devilish, devious cackle as I said it. Yes, even without looking, I can feel eyes on me wherever I go. “You look cool and rich,” our new jeweler friend answered when I asked why he came to the two of us at the top of LB. “At first, I was intimidated by you,” H. mentioned after returning to my caseload. And J. was laughing along with me, patting my back, saying he’d been waiting for me to admit what he sensed for some time.
All the way from the west coast, K. told me how strange she feels having admirers. “I’m only trying to survive as best I can, but I keep being told I’m admirable, I’m inspiring to others for how much effort I put into my self,” she said. I likened her journey to the difficult climb of a mountain, where the going is so steep you might as well be crawling up on your hands and knees. There will be others far below you, and while looking up and squinting at the sun on the snow, they’ll see your progress and cry out encouragement, maybe even envy. And you, wiping your brow with sweat despite the cold, may wonder: How can they bear to see and think about me? I’m completely occupied just with the work of making it up!
Spiritually: we’re going deeper into the unknown than we’ve ever been before but we’re not there yet. Wherever “there” is. The world is on fire, volcanic ash mixes with the pollen, and yet we’re blooming. What we said would be now is or almost is. Even if you don’t remember making the claim for this climate — it was whispered in your dreams. I feel you across rivers and oceans. We are connected and always will be. Like it or not we dwell within each other once we’ve exchanged eyes and we never leave.
Our instances of rare beauty… I can’t tell them all. But they remain remembered, all the times we’ve been out too late, all the times I’ve led us to the front of the line, sweeping through thresholds with a nod and a cheeky smile. Yes, those mornings we saw each other in our dreams, and all the minutes we’ve lost to daydreams of the other’s body. Curving, caressing, crusted and covered in moonlit sand. The invisible clouds of cologne, the new outfit you won’t admit you put on for me to see. All the eyes of all the other observers. The swelling waves of feeling, all those secret nights we remember when we got closer than we should have, when inhibitions led to secretive glances we stole, all the gifts we’ve generously given. In other words I see you, my audience, with my etheric eye. We’re watching each other in turn but seeing nothing, only the hologramic trail of ourselves — because this isn’t me and that isn’t you.
I keep wanting to be concise (and no I don’t know why yet) but there is so much I have to tell you I’m still finding the words for. So much lies beyond the horizon of where language can reach. I wish to seize you by the shoulders and shine what I’ve learned of life right into your brain. Life wants to be lived. There is an entire alternate dimension of sensation that can obliterate everything. No need for morality, traditions, or any human reason. One can be possessed. We already are — by all the fear. The hesitation of a hand hearing an unfamiliar voice in the bedroom, shadow over the knob. I catch it still, only in brief, intoxicated moments: happiness. Moments that swell. In which time is annihilated.
You miss how it used to be, don’t you? And you won’t tell anyone, not fully, not without the cover of fictionalizing or denying your feelings. Just as you, too, like to hear that your name is ringing bells. As you like to be admired and recognized. Your eyes crinkle with the smile after someone compliments you. Even if you deny or dismiss or detour from it, there is a part of you inside whose chest swells with pride when you realize another has been thinking fondly of you.
Making love is a co-regulation which curses a heart and carves on it like chisel on marble. Just by knowing each other, we’ve scarred each other beyond repair. We have tasted each other’s blood. Even at a distance of thousands of miles, even if we never see each other again, when we reminisce we summon and invoke, and no one can ever take that away from us.
I know you reminisce, and fantasize, on what is, what was, and what could have been. I can see it with my eyes closed. Go on then. Continue. In the lonely dark the thought of you thinking of me makes me smile with my teeth. It fuels me. I allow it.
Because pleasure doesn’t have to ever end. And suffering and sensation are not mutually exclusive. When you reject the clenching and the seizing because you aren’t where you want to be yet, or you think of those whose stomachs swell with hunger, or whose cheeks grow puffy with tears, who are you really rejecting? How can you please anyone else if you aren’t familiar with your body’s bliss? Saint Teresa taught us so many years ago that ecstasy can look a lot like agony; both are exigent. Even if it dooms me to say this out loud, even if it changes your idea of me, so be it — because I wasn’t ever who you thought I was — and still now I’m not who you think I am.
I know, because I looked at myself and realized I’m already split in two, masculine and feminine, condemned and the firing squad. Without thinking I posted a photo of myself in the dark woods holding my hair out of my face, and in hindsight I noticed: ah! I am the beheaded John the Baptist and the lovestruck lips of his killer Salome! I’m neither of the archetypes and both of them, I am the story and the characters!


“Oftentimes what you believe to be the truth about another person is a story that is being told about them, and this is not to say it is a false story or that we have to get emotionally caught up in the weight of finding out what is real and what is false. The point that I am making here is that it is all story. We are the ultimate symbol, but it isn’t nihilistic, it’s part of our survival.”
— (brilliant) Adira, “Do We Ever Really Know Someone?”
"Just by knowing each other, we’ve scarred each other beyond repair. We have tasted each other’s blood. Even at a distance of thousands of miles, even if we never see each other again, when we reminisce we summon and invoke, and no one can ever take that away from us." Your pieces always hit!!
l embith of the archetypes and none of them is a smasher of a line.