Dear Chris:
You said: as if sex can provide the missing clues….
I’ve been meditating for a long time now and the more stable
I become I wonder if it is ruining my art. I mean, how does hysteria help us..
get there… how to embody that Kali energy… is there another side to come out
on.
I stopped having sex a few months ago because I got tired of
fucking strangers… and by tired, I don’t mean really tired, because I loved it.
I never got bored fucking strangers, but it’s like eating chocolate cake with
every meal. You don’t start hating chocolate-- it’s just you reach a point where
you want something else for dessert. And
what’s the alternative to meaningless sex. Is it love?
Is it nothing. I thought maybe I’ll save all of that energy
for my art. But my horoscope last week read that this was a bad idea. It
literally said not having sex is bad for me … I’m an Aquarius with a rising
Sagittarius and the tarot card reading I did last week-- to see if I would ever
reunite with my ex-love-- came up 3 of swords, popping out of the deck before I
even did the spread. How can you argue with that? So I stopped talking to him
at all.
I don’t think you should ignore signs. It’s all signs isn’t
it Chris? Like now it’s just you and me here.
Two girls. Two Women. Two Bodies with Holes. Two Body Suits
talking about art.
I’m gonna try to not think about fucking you just yet.
Because I want to take it slow.
I think about fucking almost everyone I meet. Is that
normal? Is it because sex provides a clue (..... LOL to the fucking bank, Barthes...) ...we need to know how the other sees
us? Do I even exist if no one wants to fuck me?
Let’s talk about hysteria and its aesthetic. Is it even
necessary to say female here?
I saw a review online that described I Love Dick as vomiting
on the page.
Proust isn’t vomiting on the page. DH Lawrence isn’t
vomiting on the page. Fucking Milton is not a vomitorium of morality. Faulkner
is certainly not vomiting and jerking off at the same time. Hemingway is never
diarrhea. They are all the opposite of expulsion from the body. They are the
insertion into the body. Only hysterics vomit it out,
take it out of the body and put it on view.
The monster under the bed is only scary because we know
a) that the monster exists
b) we know the monster is in the room with us
c) currently we cannot see the monster, but at any moment it
may come into view
Free from the Salpêtrière:
where are the hysterics contained?
I read another review of I Love Dick where the reviewer
seemed offended that at some point the author was performing “art” and not
life. That at some point, Chris, you became self aware of your hysterics and
decided to make it art. Decided to create something bigger than your self.
Decided…. to shed the helplessness of female passivity and step into your
person suit of autonomy shoving aside your role to be an emotional caretaker
to those men whose lives you circled… you… you….. monster….You made something with your name on it. You are practically a real girl now.
“…anything that is repeated so emphatically must always be
suspected of being a kind of denial or refusal of awareness…” – Luce Irigaray
When I wrote Basic Programming I spent a year fucking
strangers to learn about how attachment works inside me so I could write
poetry. I used these men’s bodies to write poems because I’m a genius.
I used these men’s bodies to write poems because I am
Genius. Just like you, Chris. Just like Augustine writhing under the gaze of a
man thinking he was going to tell us what it means to be hysterical. Going to
measure it out. Going to take a picture of it in practice. Going to note the symptoms
and the treatments. Going to be left holding my limp "dick" in my hands when that
bird called Augustine flies away… monster us all. Wait long enough, and I’ll
write you an ending that really matters. Write enough letters to free us all.
That’s why I’m writing to you, Chris. There’s not enough
written to counter the tide yet.
“… the less we see and recognize… the more powerful and
insidious is the fiction at work…” –Luce Irigaray
So let’s see each other. Let’s see how we are hysteria and
not how it is told to us. Can a woman create without a man? Can a woman create
art without a man? Come into the menstrual hut with me. Our womb, our hystere…in the menstrual hut: we examine
the “logos” outside the spectacle, we erase through repetition, the way a poem
sings into existence a type of life forgotten. A poem rivets on the image,
images seep into the gateways of our sensory perception and tell us how to
structure the world. Hysteria is the counterpoint of control defined by the
hegemony: image of what you are allowed to be and how you want to be perceived.
We have been asleep.
But it’s all in there. It’s all inside there, under the
“bed.” It’s 2017 and we are still waiting on a discourse on female anal
eroticism… [how can it be, Eve?]
Where is our tree? My spirit animal is a snake. A fucking snake.... I wanted a wolf or a crow, but there we are, sexed in the clues all the way fucking down a rabbit hole of metaphors. I imagine you are soft. I imagine we lay together on the bed and look at plastic stars affixed to the roof of the hut, and the animals come in and we each take turns naming them.
There's no getting away from the body. There's no getting away from the sex of the body. There's just far enough we can reach with our fingers. There's just far enough we can get inside. The contraction of the uterus when it bleeds, the contraction of the vagina as it cums, the beat of the heart and the poem: a space waiting to be filled universes inside us... count me in words not yet delineated to square off the medium of what now communicates between... count off till I'm allowed to let go.
Sex isn't at all like making art, is it?
-M
