tphd:
What’s that thing they say? “Fake it till you make it”? I think it’s good advice. That’s why I spend 50 minutes every day pretending to be an enormous lizard terrorizing a panicked North America. I start with Small Town, New England, USA. I’m a lizardwind uprooting 120 white picket fences at once. I’m a river of teeth pouring into the single lane black asphalt which makes up Main Street. I’m the jaws that gnash, the claws which rend, the tail which whips with improbable speed and stupefying force; I tower over the landscape like a fast-forward figure of scaled death and I’m terrifying.
But also I’m full of joy. Sometimes I imagine a stampede of horses before me and I smile.
All mammals scurry and it’s hard not to be moved by this. The ways in which we’re common.
It’s like a form of meditation. If I’ve had a bad day, I’m not satisfied with the digestion of a minor community among the leaves and hollows of Vermont or New Hampshire, but instead must follow my lusts along the coast, down to Boston or New York. Philadelphia. And then I really let myself loose.
Nothing resets me better after I’ve been all twisted up with stress than to topple a couple of skyscrapers, to introduce a mess of broken angles into the nest of regular, right angles which represent the neurosis of human cities. Sometimes I can smell the drywall, atomized into the air. I can sense the flickering lights and sirens of emergency vehicles swarming around my perimeter like electrons in terrified valence.
I lift my nose up into the wind and I can smell the Atlantic churn. I know how it feels. Vast. Implacable.
But don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried “empty” meditation. It’s not easy to become empty. Empty your mind. Focus on your breathing. Fine but then I’m suddenly overcome with the idea that I’m a plant. My legs are roots and with every breath I’m sucking up the rich nutrients of life-giving soil and then I’m down among the worms, wiggling in the dark. I’m buried mammoths. I’m the mouldering corpse of the sedimented past. Deep pockets of oil and underground aquifers. I’m layers and layers of porous rock and I’m breathing through them. I’m the molten core and I’m churning with anger and I’m breathing, I’m breathing, I’m breathing and I’m surrounded. I’m in a cage and I want to get out.
Or else I can feel my skull and the inflated sacs of my lungs and the blood in my legs and I’m once again reminded of how frustrating it is to be physical. Our eyes face forward and fine, that’s just a circumstance. We’re all at the whim of circumstance. But have you ever tried with your eyes shut against the world to imagine facing one way while your body faces another? It’s extraordinarily difficult. Our agile minds with every moment after birth are slowly resolved to the tyranny of our bodies, are made less agile, less apt to consider other possibilities.
That’s not relaxing. That’s not clarifying. That’s the first step into a tunnel which never ends.
No, I prefer the blood. I prefer to be an animated horror in high-def 3D, rolling over the landscape of humanity in short but highly satisfying bursts. It keeps me on balance, you know?
I like to hit a lot of notes throughout the day but I try to maintain a baseline of wild, stupid enthusiasm, and regularly scheduled lizard violence is a necessary part of that regimen.
The sun is the most important part of me. The goal of the universe is to no longer exist as separate being, as such, the selfish (like myself) will compose the skin, muscles, and other thoughtless viscera of the reformed deities and those with hearts will congregate there, sending message through its body as it phases through the final hell of history.
Satan, the adversary, is the idea of an enemy, the body, mortality, gravity. Christ, who cares. Humanity is a testing ground for the wheel and other demons in a battle that was once between work and boredom and which is now between faith and sociopathy. Skyscrapers are sacrificial altars and sociopaths are autarchic souls with the ability to create religion without bindings.
Black gravel and red grass, wandering a closed circuit television in a patch of woods by the roads, pine needles, red grass and needles, wandering television as men nearby discusses the corpses of the women they made in war, forgetting they were ever in love. Speaking a red language, throwing black gravel into a truck to repair a washed out road. “My God, My God,” watching TV, and red prisoner tongue born for religion wondered doubly in his blue heart, the father of 3 dogs listening to African music, building shelves and never, never lying.
Salvation is the end of shocks to the heart, steady as she goes, riding a dog headed man and his red tongue under her apron, and his funny tender hand, and her noisy tan grip. Satan discovered black holes not due to new equipment but due to the mass production of sin, Lie, every morning the sun tries and fails to heal them. Don’t wear panties under your dress. God wants me to make you cum. Maktub, it is written. Red language in the bathroom where I wish your hair, not in the pine forest with the red grass and needles, don’t look into me, her body is not for you to fight. Don’t ever wear panties, I love your hands, the end is near.
So, yes, let’s do this to jazz: the percussion sound of bone-crack, not full crack, just the light crunch of skeleton upon skeleton, the long trombone of the 9 o’clock siren, the long whimper of the truck engine dying down, good old Bedford 4-stroke bass, the bone-beat still going….
During the summer between my fifth and sixth grade year I moved with my Mother, stepfather, and sister from Stony Brook, Long Island to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was our 3rd move in 3 years. Divorce. As the new kid in a school of students that had spent 7 years together I had my work cut out for me. Early on I got beat up in P.E. behind the baseball field by Tom Horvath and Chris DeNunsio on the run that started out class everyday. I cried but never fought back. Back on the dodgeball court Ms. Peacock, our grim P.E. instructor on Thursdays, stopped class and made me stand up in front of everyone until someone fessed up as to why I was crying. I could’ve simply been having a bad day. Regardless I never tattled and have no idea why. Probably something or other about making a bad situation worse. We stood there for maybe five minutes before Jenny F. finally cried out Tom and Chris beat him up behind the baseball diamond Ms. Peacock, can we please play now. That was my introduction to Kingston Elementary. Things got better somehow. I made people laugh. One time I caught a dodgeball thrown by Jade, the only kid in sixth grade with an earring, which freed my entire team from jail. Little things added up and I settled in. Got to the point by the end of the year where Mrs. Bradshaw picked me and one other student to participate in what she called “something special” for our sixth grade graduation ceremony in June. It was a secret and we had to practice every day after class for weeks. I was thrilled because it was something nice sticking out from the pure shit the last few years had been. So as June drew close and my dad and freshly minted stepmother and grandparents and mother and sister and stepfather and all of my school sat in the audience and waited and patiently nodded and smiled through our graduation ceremony we stood backstage waiting to reveal our secret something special. And when the time came we all filed out and stood in a line across the stage and a series of pictures projected behind us started rolling as Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All played. And we stood there and signed the entire fucking song. A group of fifteen little kids. Dressed in lace and loafers. In broken sign language. Wildly gesticulating our little hearts out to Whitney. The biggest moment of my young life. Looking back, I’d place that experience somewhere between nightmare material and potential source of my social anxiety. But goddamn that song is beautiful.
My mother played the piano every day. Her hands were these boney things that floated across the keys. I took for 14 years but was never anything close to her on the keys. Never played anything proper like Brahms or Mozart, just hits from Whitney Houston, Whitney and of course the theme from Ice Castles. Somewhere between his third and fourth Gentleman Jack my stepfather would sit down next to her and they’d sing every song off of Whitney Houston, harmonizing and laughing and sounding every bit in love. He was a tall and smug man most of my life but those moments spent wailing Saving All My Love For You are what I hold onto and offer up to the rest of my family whenever his name is brought up to curse. Another casualty of divorce. The man taught me more about being unafraid to look funny when singing something you really really love than anyone else. Stole my first cigarette from him. Merit Light. Driving to basketball practice the first Persian Gulf war started on the radio and he put his hand on my leg and we sat in silence listening to it all. Sure I can feel his large hand around my throat or the sound of my mother locked in her room. I remember that too. Whitney was everywhere. Trouble and love and family and friends and all of it. Our everyday wars. The power to make it all better if only for five minutes.
I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.
None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.
There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.
A person is buried in a wall. He becomes an insect that dances on a thin sheet of paper. it makes rustling noises, trying to hold falling particles. The insect then becomes a person, so fragile that he could crumble with the slightest touch, who is wandering around.
A dance in written form by Tatsumi Hijikata, who was the founder of Butoh. He believed that one of the strongest ways into the body was through words. (Thank you, Jeremy.)
A big ear lies on the floor at the feet. Walk along the lines of this ear. Passing curves and slopes, walk into the depth of the ear. Suddenly, an eye grows on the tip of the index finger. The nose has also become an ear. Walk lazily along the walls of the ear. Slugs are crawling on the back. The ear traces the lines of its own self. Strange curves. Voice of vendors are heard from afar. Those were the last voices that were heard. The person is moved by the ear on the tip of the nose, by the eye under the chin, and by the ear between the legs. Hands wander around the labyrinth of hands aimlessly and infinitely. It enters King Solomon’s palace.
A dance in written form by Tatsumi Hijikata, who was the founder of Butoh. He believed that one of the strongest ways into the body was through words. (Thank you, Jeremy.)
(Source: otsukimi.net)
Beautiful words from Herman Hesse. See also a poem we wrote about trees.
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the forces of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals it’s death wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk, in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal tress grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought. I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labour is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Text © From Wandering by Herman Hesse. Published by Picador. 1972.
A fallen tree in the forest of Changa Manga outside Lahore. Photograph taken on 3rd November, 2011, at 12:24 pm.
I keep returning to male approval as something that infuriates me leaves me feeling helpless and crazy and abject and desperate because my feminism is always tainted and complicit. I feel traitorous all the time. I wonder if everyone else does too. I wonder how I’m supposed to reconcile my conflicting desires. This is a quote from my fifteen-year-old diary: “I want to write but not to die. I want to fuck but not to die. I don’t want to be a human sacrifice”.
My favorite quote at that age which I found in an Adrienne Rich poem which I found in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women which I found on my mother’s bookshelf which saved my life: “You all die at fifteen” (Rich quoting Diderot talking to Sophie Volland). I say favorite but I mean I was obsessed I’d smoke pot with my best friends in forests after our Animal Farm rehearsal and then I’d have to leave and I’d hate my life and carve that quote on my bedroom wall and hide it under a Leonard Cohen poster so my dad wouldn’t yell at me for fucking up the walls. I wrote it all over my binder and on my thigh after baths which felt tragic and sexual. I ranted about it to my faithful best friend, a scruffy little blonde boy who years later I would write heaps of poetry for, totally bitter and dejected because I thought he was on my side but he stopped calling, got taller, we couldn’t cope with each other’s bodies anymore and it was like he was a man and everyone loved him for being an artist and not me and it was so unfair.
Anyways I keep thinking I’m over wanting that approval and sometimes I feel hopeful but it’s late and attachment is so complicated. This is also the story of my privilege, Adrienne Rich talks about the same thing when she says, “we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special”. There may be ways in, there are sometimes ways in, they are unacceptable and I use them all the time and when I don’t I resent my marginalization.
I am continually tempted to compromise myself in ways that would be fulfilling and intolerable, sometimes I know it and I do it anyways, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I don’t realize but I do it all the same, and that says so much about what I value, and that says so much about the power I wield and the ways that I’m lucky and humiliating
What if I died and my ghost haunted you?
What if we have been coming back to each other, now and all these past lives?
What if we have always been lovers, and in your soul is some echo of me, bringing me back to myself? What if our bodies each hold some key to the others freedom?
What if we have always been lovers, destroying each other? I try to find some touch that will soothe you, some blood letting that will satisfy us both. I need to fashion hooks to keep you in this life, so you can go on living it and be happy and grow old, without me at the edges. I need to listen for what you’re here to teach me, and I hope it is how to live my life without it being defined by fear.
You are not the one to teach me how to love without sadness, but he has never arrived, no matter who I love. That habit feels like it has been so many lifetimes in the making I’m used to it now, and it carries no fear.
Arabic calligraphy for a tattoo in my Inbox. Drinking gin with lemonade and watermelon. Falling asleep to rain, waking up to rain. Dream that I am at the bottom of the ocean, then flung violently by a wave into the sky. After the wave another wave, of broken glass and ring pulls and plastic fragments, shells. Dredged up debris arching out of the ocean like a polluted rainbow to find my naked skin. Debris sticks to my body like magnets, until I am concreted into a mask. A body that stiffens and sinks. Whales always rescue me in my dreams. Sometimes I am on a boat and the ocean is a storm or a tsunami and whales swim up underneath the boat until the boat breaks up. Then I am in the water, swimming with them. In other dreams I hear a song I can’t translate and an old woman is tattooing my chin and lips black with a bone chisel. When I wake up I think if I live to be her age, I will get this tattoo. I am always armoured with lipstick. Nude lips don’t know how to lie. I lie with silence. The second dream I had last night was about rape, and the dream after that, and the dream after that. I seek out the thumb of a new master. I am prepared to beg: make my body forget, how does a body ever forget. His opposite is a good man I’m afraid to touch. The ruin I’ll bring him in my fingertips and mouth that itches like a vein remembering heroin. Drowning because it’s the only time I feel like I’m not drowning. Drowning open mouthed, my body rained in. I haven’t forgotten how to swim, I just want to stop.
This isn’t a diary entry because of everything I leave out. This isn’t a poem or a sex tape. The only evidence is my raw knees, bitten by concrete. The first time I’ve had vanilla sex in a long time. Does it still count as vanilla sex if it’s in a car park and both lovers are exhibitionists? Returning to the first place he ever had me, when he couldn’t wait until he got me home. He has asked me to help him with intimacy before, to get over his fear of being touched with any kind of tenderness. We had never gotten this far.
He touched me gently, shyly, his hands moving across my back and ass and breasts. He has broken skin before, but last night his mouth on my breasts made teeth an afterthought. He kissed me gently, then hungrily, captured my lip in his teeth. I cupped his chin and his face in my hands. He kissed me like he wanted me to fall in love with him, he kissed me for a very long time. Later when he was still in my mouth he said, I can’t wait, and turned me over to slide my knickers down my thighs and hike up my skirt, entering me, the hugeness of him leaving me gasping. Then he asked me to get on my back and he was inside me again, his lips finding mine, not breaking the kiss. He didn’t break eye contact while he fucked me. He would go to touch me shyly, like he wanted to stroke my skin, and rest his large hands gently on me instead. For the first time as my lover, there was nothing rough about the way he fucked me. Everything felt different and new and sweet.
After he came in my mouth, his heart struggling to pump blood and oxygen through his 6”10 frame, his breathing shallow, he smiled at me. My hand touched his stomach in reassurance. We talked for a long time afterwards, sitting together, knees touching. I realised his red eyes probably meant he’d been crying before I got there. Last night there was less of the animal in him and more of the scared boy. Everything we spoke about is too sad to repeat here, sadder than The Smiths songs playing on the speaker of his phone while we talked. All suicides the same tragic cliche. I hope that being with me, talking, touching, brought him some kind of comfort. He joked about a tooth he’d chipped and the iPhone screen he’d cracked and he said, I am done fixing broken things. I remember when I once said, I am done fixing broken men, but the way he touched me without me asking, without fear, reminded me again there is something in him to protect and to save. We wrapped our arms around each other to hug goodbye, he said he hoped I’d sleep well. My small hand found his large hand, my pinky stroking his palm. He didn’t flinch. I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him good night.
Resistance is located in past forms of power in the subject’s history.
Move away from the idea of the subject composed as a list of properties toward that of a subject composed of a series of events. This gives the subject the ability for resistance in the pathway of the event of the subject’s life. Put another way subjection is not the result of listing or confessing ideas about ourselves/experiences in order to produce Truth, but of circling back upon the event of our experiences and ideas of ourselves as another event in the process of (re)creating truths about ourselves i.e. making sense of ourselves and experiences. Resistence comes from (re)experiencing past forms of power from our lives and using truths we have amassed in the interim to resist or redirect the flow of power. Not being defined by, but rather using our mistakes for example. In order to use first we must own. If only for a short time. To produce truths of our self in a moment.
Allow confession to operate within and create an Ars Erotica that explodes the master/subject dynamic of the private encounter as lesson regulated by the experienced male (and male experience) and embraces a language of the female who talks about her self and her sexuality and her practice and her experience wholly outside the mastery or Truth of the male. This is why women who talk about themselves or their sexuality or sexual experiences on the internet and elsewhere are either narcissists or oversharers or hysterics or sluts. Because if the man is no longer in control of the lesson, no longer the master teacher, then he will stop at nothing to subordinate the confessing woman—the woman confessing outside the circuit of Truth—to him or his experience or his understanding of the how things really are.
Who is the partner to which these (re)confessions are directed? Resisting confessing to a known partner with the power to “forgive, console, and direct.” Embracing confessing to a yet unseen partner of a future event.
Considering the confession as a pleasure. Techniques of producing pleasure that resist the idea of one master and pupil. Reconfigure Ars Erotica as the production of affect(s) rather than a mastered/masterful body. Confession as joy. The power a body has to connect with other bodies. A positive (productive) encounter is a feeling of an increase in power in the body such that each of the bodies is able to go out and repeat the process.
Even though a “great archive” of pleasure is being assembled through the practice of confession the archive is fluid, it contracts and breathes continually as people engage the archive through practice, as they encounter and produce affects, as they have more and more “joyful” encounters through the process of (re)confession.
tphd:
BEAST by THERON JACOBS
(PLEASE PRETEND TO BE A BEAST WHILE READING THANK YOU)
