Him
It is early morning - rainy, quiet, and still dark, and he woke up to an owl hooting. Owls in the big city have a melancholy quality, a low resonant, and questioning intonation to their regular and darkly punctuated hoot. He listens until 5:30, when the owl moan stops. Is that when owls stop in nature, everywhere, the forest, the ailing tree in the back of a three flat on Damen Avenue? Why? Wisdom's sake? And now that sound is gone, and the other less dramatic birds aural lives are slowly being absorbed by the traffic billowing on Damen Avenue, the sounds of badly kept engines, patched mufflers, and trucks spewing carbon monoxide multiplying in some geometric regularity in increments of minutes.
Today he woke up hating himself, and the hating wove throughout the owl
sound, followed him through the trash birds and sparrows, through the sound
of his water faucet and the brushing of his teeth, and circled his image
in the bathroom mirror like a dark-winged bird, silent-winged bird. Look
what he's done. All those people, some so sweet - he has made them broken,
or at least interjected a series of moments broken up and leaving a hole
in their lives, and all because of him. He imagines the bad Karma, knows
there's time to erase it, heartbreak by heartbreak. But these thoughts are
only a before-coffee down, representative of pre-caffeine simplistic thinking,
one dimensional, lacking conflict, and without dichotomies to explode. Unliterary
beating of the self, the non-fiction unable to soothe the heart, and fiction
not yet born this sunrise. A walk to the local coffee shop starts the integration
process, the multi-purpose creativity rises from nightly ashes. His Discman
plays Mahler, while the trash and shit of the night before reeks, the muddy
slime of these and other indescribable elements mixed with rain everywhere,
even on the knob of the gate leading from his doorway to Damen, and on the
handle-bars of his bike. His mind, a writer's mind, makes all integrate
into a whole: the hating, the ugliness, the excuses, the filth of reality
- the frame of an artistic temperament cleaning it up with the ache of Mahler,
and together these conflicting sensual and cerebral experiences achieve
the perfect Manechean duality. A duality of good and evil that acts like
a kernel radiating outwards encompassing all involved and in the end he
is not the perpetrator, but a participator. Yes, those concentric rings
rippling around the perfect balance of fault and innocence explains everything,
everyone, and his evil, his good, is balanced by everyone else, and they,
like him, are thus washed clean.
In the realm of reality, that matter-differentiated kind, no cleansing quite
yet - the street's filth is still muddy and its smell warmed to a distillate
potency by the sun. His mind begins to control the scene, it notices, cuts
into pieces, puts back together into something else all the elements into
contemplations. The Mexican vendors and metal pickers delivering their rot
and trash along our writer's path slip and slide and have mud on their pant
legs. He notices the storefronts, imagines the process of mud/filth, pant
legs, corroded truck to store shelf, and his own hand paying out a few coffee's
worth for something. Funny how a pound of rotting peaches can cost the same
as a pound of rusted old metal kitchen cabinets, doors missing. All the
detritus of a picky consumer world costs the same in the end, to whoever
wants it, and here, everyone wants, needs it. Every stripped screw, every
pulpy and blackening jalapeno has possibilities, a use, given a disguise.
Guacamole looks green in the end, despite the rot, despite the rusty utensil
used to mash it, despite the blood red hate of the hands that make it, here,
on Damen, to shovel out at the same price per four ounces on a bed of lettuce
as the price of four ounces of cheap tea, scam pot, defective matter of
any kind. The only holy substance worth more is worth too much. But he doesn't
think about that now, maybe later, after the day's work is done.
The coffee house is the same - artsy, an awful word but he relishes using
it. In his mouth it becomes pejorative, arrogant. He's pleased to be amid
that which he despises. A perversion he feels is productive and the effects
of which keep his hairs up - sensing everything, enveloping all potential
meanings, multiplicities, in antennae capable of engulfing their prey with
slow-poison spit. The place is filled with the regulars, and the air is
damp with their desperation. All those wanna-be's, those artist girls with
chopped hair, dreams patchouli soaked, cloudy with chain smokes, those girls
that try to seed the artistic in themselves, but always end up grasping
for it on the outside by fucking the musician and writer boys with booze
pot belly's already spouting, AA ahead, but not yet. The girls fuck themselves
dry - not an image, not a sound, not a note and nothing but a dead soul,
and the boys, well, they go on, always, they go on. He, our writer, knows
he'll make it. He can handle the booze, the weekly H-hit, all the spreading
his sexual addiction around the neighborhood, all the need that bleeds from
him in so many forms, costing him nothing but a few moments of dishonest
charm - honey-tongued man. He can handle the artistic girls as they crumble
under the truth of his fucking them, just fucking them, that moment they
wake up wanting love, trying to stalk love out of him, slit their wrists
to bleed his love of him. No, he knows how to handle it all. Nothing will
keep him from what he wants.
He orders regular coffee, black, and "baguette with pesto." Foo
foo shi shi food, for an Eastern bay poor boy. But he likes his food, has
acquired a fine taste, as fine a taste as he has in music, in ideas, in
women in silk underwear. He has crossed so many lines in his life, but never
rests in any of the new places he absorbs. He can even bring up his Eastern
poor boy accent whenever he wants, and switch right back to University of
Chicago MFA degree talk, with its atonal inflections. Not like the eastern
sentences: teeter-totter music, sentences ending up on high notes like a
question, falling without answers, without counterpoint, harmonies reeling.
His father likes his food fine, too. He's a waiter in a fishing town, nearing
fifty and an eater too, an absorber of fine things like his son, but dad's
nearing the end of lies to himself about what went wrong. No, his son can't
end up this way. He's got control. He orders the food, not delivers it,
if you know what I mean. Anyway, he's not that fragile. A little indulgence,
some playing with razor blades between the piano keys won't grip him the
way it gripped his father. Let himself be strangled, that man. Not him.
In fact, what he seemed to himself, under all this garbage, all these seeming
drives and willful advances into the world of things and senses, all the
gesture of connections, is autistic. Not crazy, not cruel, lost, or on a
cerebral edge, but autistic. Not recognizing anything outside one's own
mind, and one's mind is always a safe place to be, no matter how bucked
up or flying everything outside of it is, even the mind's own body. Maybe
someday he'll buy into the mood regulators he sees half the writers he knows
pop with their coffee. When he is solidified psychiatricaly, pharmaceutically,
therapeutically, will he be dead? He wants to only see the moment, not the
people in the moment, and being dead is being right there, where the people
are. To be autistic is to need no one; to be solidified, normal, to live
and breath everyone else's air, is to hurt, to want.
He can't let anything hurt him. Not even the possibility of the moment.
He categorizes those, blunts the tendrils of simple hopes, that human thing,
and possibility is placed in impermeable parameters which cannot hurt, like
categories to be filed when the case is getting hot, file it under one small
letter, no matter how complex, unsolved or big, and case closed. He is in
control, even of outcomes, of judgments, of the way anything that happens
appears and from what angle. Tensile strength. Always bending, rushing,
unbroken. But, in control of what? Hollow victory at times. Hollow, but
warm, soft, round at others. Her name doesn't matter. Not all the senses
can be satisfied at once, not all the menacing, unbalancing, strangely uncategorized
secret needs inside, so take what you can. Its his insides he can't categorize;
he watches the battles, helpless to name them. But he will place them in
their folder, package, sell them in neat binders to whatever is outside.
That is control.
Anything else is painful, cracks his "creativity" in shards. He
finds the air even hurts sometimes in its unpredictability, the way it caresses
his head, pulls his soul out screaming hair by hair, and even the memory
of the sound of the owl breaks across his field of vision then, like thunder
- and the image he sees isn't his idea of real, the image he sees is provoked,
not eidetic or anything fancy. Just provoked, like an assault. He knows
there is a crime somewhere, but who is the perpetrator? Who the victim?
Control needs the answer, but these identities slide around too fluid. Both
roles are good to him, depending on the situation. When she cries in one
way, he's the victim, and he apologizes, kisses her as tenderly as he never
was kissed, and pretends he'll be back. Great final gestures take place
then which satisfy them. Gestures in doorways, doe-eyed, misty good-byes.
She's fooled. When she cries in another way, he's the perpetrator. She likes
it. She wants to like it that way. Both victim and perpetrator act, both
take, both try to keep their stories straight. Its part of the game. If
you blur the edges of the narrative, you're lost. Lost.
Antonin Artaud said he could not create anything which could mask his continual
scream. Nothing - not words, not an image, a play, an essay, a place invisible
in invisible air, nothing, even though the scream is silent, sharp, and
palpable. Our young man can't control that one thing, that scream only he
knows is there, though it is so precise he should be able to sum it up,
grab it, transform it. That scream is as precise in its outlines as a woman's
body as he sums it up, knowing from each minute gesture what she will want,
what she will be willing to give when he asks for it all without her realizing
how it all happened and why she's giving it.
No, he can't contain that scream, and it fills his arterial writing like
blood. His words are a vein traveling through his body, a connection line
from outside to in, inside to out, and that scream, that unpredictability
he can't control inside is the blood. But nobody sees, even the soft prying
mouth that curves seductively as her eyes read what he has given her to
read to "know him." Yeah, she'll "know" him alright.
That curved mouth, licks the blood, eats the words though so many of them
are covered in shit, in the detritus of a soul, and with her mouth full
of the excrement of his scream, she gives him an ovation with her body,
gives him even her lies to herself.
He'll kill the one that knows this about in him but loves him anyway. Kill
her slowly, without pity, and with a sweetness as rose-drenched as a saint's
death.
So, all things considered, the question is as far as art goes, does he want
to sort out the senses? He imagines his images neatly pooled in one place,
his sounds in another, his geometrical sense of time brought down into flattened
space, and his touch concentrated in antennae catting around some curved
skin tied up in velvet ropes? And the scream, what "sense" is
that? Maybe taste, the taste of shit in the mouth, or sugar, depending on
the day and the level of lucid vs. drugged self-perception. Senses, all
arranged into a map, cartography of life, instead of the spinning globe
with its mess of ocean, land, ice. A map to throw darts at, to fling shit
at, to tear up in a whim and start mapping a new universe, clean and primordial,
Adam and Eve, wild and verdant flowers. He will be the creator.
Even at that thought, his senses so neatly bundled, separate, controlled,
begin to drip, pollute each other, all melted down by some other sense he
can't name. What's left is a play world, temporary like one made of clay
unfired in all the atmospheric changes like a pot that didn't quite bake,
and something, some liquid a little too hot, or too cold, someday, someday,
will make it crack? Poor worlds imagined from artificial maps, from arrangements
of the fluid, the chaotic, the bits of earthy reality. Poor worlds. He wonders
where all this negativity came from. Shit. Something's bringing him down.
He'll stalk it, hunt it, her, that, nothing...whatever. Back to Eden, the
adrenaline soaked earth of his, diamond sand, crystalline, humid, fecund
... his.
Well, looking at the world he made now, something comes into a certain view,
that vision of desire, the rolling, patchouli drenched mountains in that
world, that make that world, and which are mountains soft-voiced under the
moon. There, creator of this world, then, he can just spit out, I am who
I am, scream and all, spit at that world, hide the scream in that silent
spot on the mountains ledge, there between her breasts, between her thighs.
No matter that across her body he tastes the mountains emptiness, he hears
the soft petals of a cosmic rose dropping into the back cavern as she screams,
and the very texture of the moment is touchable, rough, grotesque as his
mind rubs against it. It's all in the mind. It's all there, his, a world,
or no world, a cosmic rose that ruled the seething center, but drops, dies,
no matter, it all leaves him in a pose of power. He is the chrysalis, he
is the corolla, he is the rose thorn, king of Damen and North, now, and
later, the world through the world's eyes that read his screams. Novelist,
king. Man embraced by soft-skinned landscapes, filled with murmuring rivulets
that soothe him, quench his thirst, are brought to flowing by him, and Mahler
can be heard by everyone walking through the mud, the shit, the scrap metal,
the rotting peaches, and they will do reverence. Mahler will provide the
frame, he the complete picture in which they will want to live, the world
where they will need to love him, the world he secretly hates and wants
to shit on because he can't hear it, can't touch it, can't make it understand
... can't make it stop.
He's above now, watching the mountains rolling, commanding the mountains
to roll, hearing the sighing, hearing the screams of the cracks he wills
across her skin, and the worlds he has made are miles below him. He is alone,
completely alone. And still, there is nothing he wants better, since he
is woven into the matrix of the very pulse of his own existence, and wants
what he wants, no more, no less. At least he knows, and wakes up knowing,
that metaphors will hurt today, like a chained fist, feeling its own constricted
pain before it inflicts it outwards to an uncomprehending world. Flat word,
dead world, and he is in control, he made it. So, instead of metaphors of
fists, metaphors of pain, just take a real fist, create real pain - be true.
Writing must be true, and she is - in real silk, her eyes closed, her mouth
gagged, her hands held behind her back held by his mind, and he is above,
looking down at his own scream coming from her. Only this is real, when
its all a creation of his mind, a mind that can even make things be born
or make them die, if he chooses, between the first cup of coffee, and the
first refill....
Her
It is early morning - rainy, quiet, and still dark, and she woke up to the plaintive meow of one of her cats, the one she calls Jasper, while the other cat, Luna, has been on her back for some undetermined length of dream, kneeding one paw at a time in that strange ubiquitous cat's contemplation ritual. Her head is pounding, and a bitter excremental taste wells up in her mouth, but she concentrates her energies on visualizing an emptied brain, her brain, becoming as soft as the cats' purrs. She believes cats are representative of the eternal goddess in herself, even Jasper, and she believes they send her messages through some cat-telepathy, woman to cat, cat to woman, read-me-over-and-out, the cosmos listening and embracing their secrets. Someday she plans to write a novel about the cat / woman thing, tell the world from the vantage point of her primordial female connection to the word of life, etc. etc., and so doing, inform them of yet one more thing they need to strive towards in order to be human. But infinitesimal steps, she understands through years of experience, are necessary to reach even the most cosmically prescribed goal, not divine intervention, or St. Michael type slayings in one fell swoop. So, the morning is begun with her highly disciplined journal writing, a method of catharsis for writing her real creative work later in the day, a method she learned from a class she took at a local community center, "The Spiritual Path to Creativity." The class came with a book, so she could do it all on her own, which she opted to do sometime in the fifth week of the twelve week course. She didn't need that structure, time based and regular. On her desk are all the objects she has intuited are necessary for optimal creativity by going through the 12-week course in a need-specific fragmented way numerous times since then. Some of the objects she needs to inspire certain critical energy, others to suppress other destructive energy, channel some other diffuse energy - the free-radicals of the creative bloodstream. Sage in a blue jar, a rose-scented pink candle, a journal made of recycled paper and covered in a new age pseudo-Japanese design, pencils carved from rose and birch woods, painted with the African symbols of the Seven African Gods, and a religious icon candle of The Virgin Mary of Guadeloupe, amethyst stones, jade. Everything permeated, even the stones, with the patchouli incense and oils she has learned keep her chakras in top shape.
The Virgin Mary candle is one of those 72-hour religious candles even the
Walgreens on Milwaukee Avenue now stocks for all the Hispanic clientele
of Wicker Park, though she would never stoop to such commercialism, and
instead she gets hers from a Santiera shop nearby. For $1.99 anyone can
ask any saint, bring any love, luck or money gods into the window right
at the foot of one's bed, or above the kitchen sink in even the most rotting
and overpriced apartment on Ashland Avenue. She loves best this candle with
a paper sticker representing The Virgin Mary of Guadeloupe, seeing her as
the guardian saint of young artistic women whose "internal goddess"
is waiting to flower, chastely, from small anorexic white hands. Even though
she's not a virgin herself, it doesn't matter, her art will come out of
her born like virginal roses, small, tight and unfurling from the tips of
her rose and birch pencils, spreading their fragrance across the recycled
journal paper pages that are a soft yellow color, like antique diaries or
letters, aging in a small box somewhere, unseen, for a century, or never.
She lights her Virgin candle whenever she gets home, and always before bed,
letting it burn the night through. First, a bed-time prayer to the Virgin,
then, for atonement for not having created enough on any particular day,
she does another ritual of self-reflection by doing another exercise from
her "Spiritual Path" book. Before bedtime self-reflections on
topics like "The 10 Most Common Excuses for Creative Block," excuses
she knows she uses constantly, but the book assures and reassures her in
the darkest moments that they will fade, be strangled by her own voice,
once she realizes these excuses are voices of "internal demons"
telling her she's no good, she's not deserving of her own happiness, she's
not worthy of initiating a creative act. She sees the demons sometimes in
a bodily form - animal shapes, some with sharp teeth, some with vacant but
disconcerting eyes, some trying to bite chunks out of her thin arm. Women's
demons the books says, are a political and social, psychological miasma
of other voices, not the woman's own voice, which can be ordered with a
few simple steps and the guidance of a certified "Spiritual Path"
instructor. Purity is simple, creativity is simple, always, and she's killing
off those demons one at a time, envisioning blood and demon guts spread
out under a golden goddess sword, and evaporating into glitter and settling
on an unsuspecting world, a world she makes cleaner for them by writing
her battles into clean prose.
Another exercise she does from her class is the one called "Getting
Rid of Crazy Makers," an exercise helping the contemplator to identify
who are the people in her life, the Crazy Makers, who take away her creative
energy, sabotage it, eat it in syrupy strands with lascivious smiles as
she watches unaware, her roses fading, charmed. Crazy Makers are people
who, the book says clearly, "take, not give, who want, not care."
She dwells on her mother many nights, can hear her voice telling her things,
and dwelled on her father only once, his voice saying nothing she could
or wanted to hear again, and she sometimes tried to pin the Crazy Maker
definition on all the men she's been involved with. She isn't feeling guilty
thinking about all those men in front of the Virgin Mary of Guadeloupe since
these were relationships, even if they were only one night. No they weren't
fucks, distracted lusts. She's not like that, not anymore. Not after all
this constructive work she has put into furthering her art by getting in
touch with her insides first, however long that takes. She is a goddess,
eternal, profound. She is a writer. Deep. She repeats these positive messages
to herself 10 times a day, and has them written on small pieces of paper
and taped everywhere - the refrigerator, the mirror, the closet door, in
front of the sink, so she can remind herself continuously. She is and she
believes it, and believes with her goddess faith that the men believe it
too, see it shining from her. The Virgin of Guadeloupe believes it in the
depths of her virgin heart. So every moment in which she shares her divine
atmosphere in even what the unevolved spiritually would term the raunchiest
act is, she believes, willed by her sacred goddess who must know first hand
the energies of the cosmos, and divert them outward into sheer goddess power
- female embracing of the evils, even the taming of those poor male principles
out there. No matter what it takes, no matter how much she has to give to
get this knowledge. Forgive them, Virgin - forgive them, Spiritual Path
- forgive them, even her creative principle struggling to unfurl rose-like
around their phallic symbols there materialized....they know not what
they do .
Morning continues with her journal. She begins by deprogramming her brain,
as the instructions say, getting rid of all the stuff of daily life: "
...I am so sick of my waitress job at Pontiac Grill, sick of all the cockroaches,
sick of the pathetic losers that come in and sit all day writing poetry
from the "I" position, fiction from their inflated male egos,
careening prose. I'm sick of the rotating art on the walls by the same male
egos who paint nothing but a tit coming towards their mouth, not a tit in
repose, goddess woman. Or they paint the careening prose of their own spirit
into abstract expressionism that looks like shit-vomit across ashes. Who
cares about their pathetic lives anyway who cares and I am sick of the grease
behind the menu items that bill themselves as healthy and balanced its all
grease in the end, and caffeine and cigarette smoke, some smelling like
cloves, some like vanilla. I WANT TO BE PURE, I HAVE TO PURIFY MYSELF to
be a writer or is this an excuse but its not on the list of the 10 most
common excuses for creative block which are only fear and I think purifying
myself will get rid of fear and can only help and the only fear I really
have is being alone...but the only vices I have are chain-smoking and some
occasional self-obliteration when I lose control, but otherwise I am perfect,
I am the goddess, I am ....I am..."
She stops abruptly there, and she thinks of him. That guy she met at the
coffee shop a few weeks ago, and they hooked up a few times, slept together
each time. She thinks he is a soul in search of a soulmate. She, the goddess,
will fuel him, his words, and he'll realize...no, he'll experience his creativity
for the very first time through her, though he's written a novel and a bunch
of short stories already, and getting a Ph.D. Big fucking deal, the cosmos
yells, but she knows the male principle can't hear that yell. These successes
are illusions of creativity manifest, aren't anything without the missing
piece. Her. She's feeling herself drifting through a picture of him between
her legs, out to the ungoddessy female place, the bitchy place - and her
pen starts scratching: "he's a total shit, actually. A cad and a liar,
or the modern word, "a player." He drinks too much, talks too
much and too loud, thinks too much of himself...he's so fucking proud...but
he should be proud, he is in control of his masculine principles.
He has become them, as I am becoming the embodiment of the female..."
She goes back to her journal, thinking she would write the ill-will suppressed,
that nagging dirt embedded in this last line of the fleeting cosmic out
of herself. She scribbles faster now, "I must trust in the goddess
in me, trust in the deep connection I feel with him, and trust in the blessing
of the spiritual path on our relationship...yeah, trust in the relationship
but wait, WHAT RELATIONSHIP? He hasn't called me in five days, after doing
some sexual stuff together that he must realize requires my faith in him
and he wouldn't break that faith I know, the goddess knows. Shit! I did
it again, didn't I dear journal? Its always the same, isn't it but I need
to do laundry and I am so tired so tired art is good, art is beautiful,
but love is always better, always the thing to strive for, and somewhere,
somehow, the words and the love will melt together and become one. Follow
the Spiritual Path, follow the Virgin Mary, but they must all lead to love,
right? Without love, what is there? I don't know, I don't know, but maybe
I should start talking about my creative endeavor goals for the day now,
since I am feeling down, down, sucked dry somehow, and I have to work today,
a full shift, and have to have something, something left over for writing
my novel tonight and I have to do laundry, go to the Santiera shop, buy
some food. Oh well Dear Journal, I have something positive and self-affirming
to tell you: Looking back I like the voice I use in this journal. It's so
cool sounding, the diction is elegant, yeah, so self-possessed. It's all
a little stilted, but I am growing into it, into it pretty fast and hard.
And if someone reads this journal, I want it to sound good, and to represent
my 'self' in progress..." She closes the journal, traces the Japanese
calligraphic symbol on the cover with her finger, and leaves the book out,
opens to these last pages, leaves it open. She has no secrets, even if someone
were here tonight, she'd leave it open.
She looks at her calendar and realizes today is the full moon, and she has
to go to her coven meeting tonight to celebrate the spring solstice. Fertility,
moon, goddess, protection, the words born of this stuff. Around the room
are the amulets, the tokens, the books of spells and rules for white witch
codes of ethics, the black witchcraft books safely out of reach in the back
of her closet, the Bats Blood for warding off evil energies, the Sage for
purifying, the various stones and powders for keeping her safe from all
the evil everywhere in everyone, the potential of evil in the smallest event,
or word...safe . Some people criticize her for her involvement
in the coven and some guys think its either really weird or its a big turn-on,
but she knows it is an intellectual and spiritual path for her ... a calling
she would say, almost a vocation to her avocation of being a writer. She
can work at spreading good with her powers and herbs, she can comfort the
sick at heart, she can spell-wish all her love through the universe, goddess-fertilize
the universe, and she can do all this no matter what isn't happening in
the other parts of her life. The intellectual part is something all those
cerebral writer types that hang out in the restaurant and tell her she needs
to go back to school and finally finish her MA. in creative writing could
never understand. Its a duality of good and evil that she has experienced
first hand, with her soul, not her mind mainlining the truth in the male-writer's
cerebral way, but her mind absorbing and being reshaped by her soul, her
witches power to transform everything, even the rot of the universe, into
the pastoral, the pure hedonistic pleasures of Pan and Artemis. Her intellect
is strengthened too by the moment to moment choice all followers of these
sacred arts have to make - between using their powers for good, or evil,
white witchcraft, or black. Radiating outwards from her choice to send her
power outwards from good intentions or evil are endless chains of reactions
through infinity. Yes, she can talk about infinity like anyone else, even
though she's a waitress and a dropout, because she's destined by her star
and by her calling and her gifts to fulfill the goddesses prophecy of woman
and the word. What could the MA program and all of its soul-shrinking rules
and requirements do for her? She thought the men that wanted her appreciated
how her passion led her to make choices like these, radical, goddess warrior
against an oppressive universe.
Back to reality, the time and space oriented kind - she had to get to work.
She opens her closet and the patchouli concentrated behind the closed doors
embraces her, and for a moment, the aromatics touch off a deep soul-thought
about not going to work and sacrificing money for her art. Patchouli soaked
image of herself at her desk, the sage smoking, the Virgin looking on approvingly.
The neatness of her closet reminds her that she is a disciplined artist,
and must do what's necessary, and she proceeds on the path of least resistance.
Choosing her outfit is easy since she developed her style as a natural outcome
of her personal and spiritual growth process. A critical point was when
she accepted her body as goddess body, accepted her sexuality as power,
and wore without shame the shortest skirts she could find, sometimes with
thigh high stockings, sometimes with black tights, sometimes with nothing
on her loofahed and mineral/seaweed bath salts soaked legs. A vintage ivory
sheer blouse was just fine, thank you world, and a black bra under the ivory
lace was for her a political statement - her sexuality was nothing to be
ashamed of and her presenting it to the general public was her proclamation
of freedom to be her "birthright," a woman with a full-round mate-with-me
butt and suck-me breasts pushing at the demure little pearl buttons on her
vintage blouse, an interesting woman of contrasts
. She was freed from her mother's injunctions to not give the wrong message,
freed from daddy, freed from her own fears of her own message, and most
importantly freed from the guilt, the heavy, screaming-child guilt since
she had purified herself of all the social injustice which places women
in that precarious position between virgin and whore. She was love. She
was energy. She was embracing the cosmos, not fucking a guy in the bathroom
at a local bar some evenings like she did a month or so ago, before meeting
him...her soulmate. Fucking that guy standing up in the bathroom, the door
locked, with fifty beery people milling around outside knowing what they
were doing behind the door, or at least guessing they were dealing drugs
or fucking, or maybe she was giving him a blow job for some coke, either
way, she was free, free to embrace the energies of the moment, explore her
sexuality as her internal drives led her. Those fifty drunken slobs out
there didn't have a clue. Not a clue. Everything she did was for a reason,
all for a great and cosmic plan.
When she took a literary theory class for her MA. in Creative Writing, she
came to love a French theorist, Helene Cixous. Not popular with those cerebral
English lit women grads in class, but she knew that Cixous and she had a
special bond of understanding the truth about the woman writer. She preferred
to cite Cixous' own fiction instead of Cixous' own theoretical works because
it told more about the writer - told more about her own artistic drives
and dreams. One of her favorite passages was from the novel The Book
of Promethea . A woman's art is not a theory, it just is. She would
read Cixous' words to all the men she thought she might like to get to know
- a sort of preliminary test. If they understood the words, why she was
reading these words to them, they understood her soul, and she knew he would
honor that soul and take from it its most goddessy gifts. She had read a
certain passage of Cixous words so many times, alone, tracing them with
an index finger, that the page was worn, yellowed and soiled. She read them
now, one last fortification to get her outside, on the way down Milwaukee
to her job, to the grease, the stink of men belching and farting as they
write for hours, coffee, and a two dollar tip. For one minute she couldn't
remember what the words were about for her, though the interpretations of
the men could articulate themselves in her brain verbatim. She reads the
words again -
When you went away, you left me nothing but the sunbleached world. You
did not even leave me a heart to bleed with. I found I was standing there
with no body, and so no voice for calling you.
Wait for me now.
Now I see you, I see it all, it all comes to me, you hit me all at once,
ten times I am struck by your hair, your body emits thousands of rays at
me.
I am bombarded by happiness, I am pierced by life.
I come back to myself.
It begins. First the blank pain. First the fear of death. It has begun.
I am already afraid. No desire yet. No. I am still too faint, too dim. I
do not have enough strength yet to start dying again.
Reading these words just now made her head throb across the temples. The
salesgirl at Whole Foods last week had recommended a tea called "Vitex
Women's Toner" to balance her energies - hormonal progesterone and
estrogen, her vital birthright fluids, apparently needed balancing according
to the symptoms she had described to the salesgirl - the headaches like
the one she was having now, the creative block, anxiety, restlessness...inability
to sleep, to stop crying. The tea will do it, exorcise the imaginary things
which are making her imagine her life is nothing. Its all a matter of balance,
and the mind follows, the creativity follows, the love materializes in a
big, pure cloud of destiny, tea for two, me for you....the Seven African
Gods attending in flowing robes the union of spirit and matter, a moment
in her life when it will all come together. She can't go there now, she
thinks, not now, the party has to wait, the matter and the spirit were still
battling.
Its just the matter tended to be differentiated from the spirit when it
came to the men she experienced herself with, the ones she consciously chose
as part of her growth process. She once wrote in her journal, and left the
page open to this sentence for days: " matter is violently separated
from the spirit's rose drenched ecstasies and cosmic visions of the sap
pulsing through each petal's veins...the creative principle plumbing the
depths of all things to bounce back and join their fingertips for a moment,
eyes meeting." Yeah, his fingertips become fingers, move away from
hers, become hands which reach around her, become a dense force inside her,
bending, rushing, unbroken lunges of the masculine force in and out of her
matter, her spirit perched next to the Virgin Candle, watching. Does she
want to know about that force which she secretly wants, under all the cover
of translucent witches brew, of wafty Virgin candles, sage smoking around
the baseboards of the bedroom in which she wants him to show her a world
of chaos her own soul can't find, can't admit to wanting. Chaos of screams,
chaos of force holding her down, his tying her hands together, chaos of
her skewed perspective of the Virgin Candle, the notebook, the lace curtain
as he turns her over, honors the creative in her like she's never been honored,
like Cixous would smile approvingly at. She trusts her inner goddess that
this is a journey she must take, that he is the chosen one to teach her
about this part of herself so that she can write out for the world to read
the truth of the deeper, pre-conscious level of primordial man and woman,
and she knows his saying to her he's going to finger-fuck her first, saving
his dick for a butt-fuck, is all to lead her there, where the words will
come, uninhibited, true..."Virgin Mary, don't save me this time, not
this time," she prays, before he gags her mouth with a velvet rope
and takes it all from her - eats the goddess out of her ass and spits it
out in her face turned sideways, a bloody pulpy witch-glob dripping across
her white, anorexic cheekbone. Her spirit perched nearby vomits on the Virgin,
but she can see through the blindfold he put on sometime without her realizing
she suddenly couldn't see that the light is still burning, flickering, but
burning, not doused by the weakness of the spirit's watery and mutable constitution.
All she can think of, in this dark place, silent place where she can feel
the pain directly, without other senses interfering, is "Beautiful
image to carry over into his work, beautiful." She has sacrificed,
she's satisfied, she knows only good can come of this for her spiritually,
giving herself as rose-drenched shit saint of the novelist king of Damen
and North, the guy everybody wants and she has him, has him, right there
where she wants him - wanting her, taking from her without asking...immersed
in the infinite power of her screams and her full round ass, her fully liberated
breasts torn through the pearl buttons on her vintage blouse, spread in
a flat, globular expanse against her all-cotton un-dyed natural colored
sheets, smeared with blood and excrement down where she can't yet see, and
he wants her to see, to smear her face in it and make her ask for more.
A ritual of art, of image, of man/woman primordial, all wrapped in an earthly
unenlightened illusion of fucking and using, for the enlightened to peel
off as they attain that vision she has reached by taking tea, lighting her
candles, her spiritual path, her journal full of lies to herself, lies she
wouldn't give to him, since art can ask for only so much. She has devoted
her life to this moment, seeing through what's happening here, to the beautiful
truth of it, seeing through him, through all the lies he gives her to test
her love, to him, her soulmate. He knows what she believes, and believes
her, and she believes this, and he has to, for his own writing, the perfection
of a scene he's tried to write a hundred times before this, but maybe she'll
be the one to perfect it with her perfect circle ass and tits, and she knows
her gift is precious. She knows in witchcraft and other ancient philosophies,
the circle is the symbol of union, and all things located like points on
the circumference of a circle are perfectly joined, no matter how disparate.
Before heading out to work, she looks at her journal lovingly, reads slowly
a part describing a real version of what she was thinking of just then,
and she notices proudly how these writings are unguarded and free flowing,
though growingly incoherent. That's cool she thinks because she isn't trying
consciously anymore, its all just coming, concentric rings, orgasmic and
cosmic circles. She's deciding to skip the coven meeting now, because she's
the only witch member who really understands that mind-altering substances,
when used with a pure heart and with pure intentions, can send the mind
to witch-nirvana, to the witches heaven washed clean of matter-laden pains,
that human stuff she's getting to be above now. Objective, true. There's
no place for earth mud in cosmic endeavors, no place at all, and because
she knows this deep in her witch-soul, she can let it all go, not obsess
about her wanting someone there more than any man ever wants to be there,
in her bed, holding her, both of them reverentially gazing at the Virgin
Mary of Guadeloupe candle before making the sacrificial act, before writing
the sacred words, together, separately. She takes some wine now, before
going to work, and follows with some scotch, both holy liquids in a beautiful
fake-silver chalice with a Bacchic cornucopia design on it in relief, and
a phallic symbol, a critical half of the divided worship circle, and the
eternal pentagram woven ornamentally around the phallic symbol and encircling
at the same time the abundance of Bacchic fruit and vines. A solemn moment,
this, representing an accomplishment of her coming of age into true woman,
goddess, and soon, soon, writer, creative self dominating all the others
that scream for attention in the few hours she has to herself, between waitressing
and rituals, sacred and profane. Her coming to know man as deeply as she
has made her see she has so much more to explore, and she wants all the
forbidden knowledge now, and so she adds a joint to the ritual, though coke
is better but she's down to her last tip mad-money. She wants to go through
the day noticing everything, down to the molecular texture of the grease
on the countertop at Pontiac. She wants to drown in fluid sensual data now,
drown, soak up all the liquid of the universe like a large spongy uterus,
and then be fucked dry by someone, anyone, in order to start anew, paper
thin and ethereal, refashioned from a dense, heavy anorexia and a fecund
but sterile wordless writer, to write a novel, in a journal where the cover
has the Japanese calligraphic symbol meaning "We share the moon,"
and in which the pages are the pale golden color of tea...
Them
Him: Hey. How you do'in? (he unpacks and arranges his notebooks
and pencils)
Her: OK. The usual? (she pours coffee into cup on table, he begins
drinking and lights cig.)
Him: Whoa! Am I getting predictable? You'll be bored with me soon. Coffee,
black, and
pesto baguette. At least I know what I like, right? (blows out smoke)
Her: (seriously, straight faced, earnestly) No, I'm never bored
by anyone, since I'm a writer. I
observe, and the truth is always interesting don't you ....
Him: We should hook up sometime, I'm a writer too.
Her: I thought that was why you probably sat here day after day year after
year writing. Duh.
Him: (smiles boyishly, winks, speaks in singsong eastern drawl
) OK, OK, I find this atmosphere productive, and the waitress inspiring.
I heard
you were studying for an MA. in Creative Lit. I'm getting my Ph.D. too,
in Creative Writing, but I already have an MFA from ....
Her: (harshly ) What do you think of Helene Cixous? (looks
straight into his eyes)
Him: (hesitates, takes a drag from cigarette, smiles mysteriously,
touches her hand understandingly )
I am a liberated feminist man. I support women in their trying to take their
rightful place by whatever means they see fit. So, look, do you want to
hook up or not?
Her: What does "hook-up" mean?
Him: I like an intelligent woman who deals in semantics....
Her: I'm dealing in ...
Him: 9:00 tonight? Meet at the Fireside Bar on Division for drinks?
Her: OK. Bring something you've written, and I'll bring something too. It's
a good way to get to know someone...
Him: Yeah sure. (his cup empty, he holds it up, she gives him a refill,
walks away purposefully and puts in order, he watches her ass, takes a drag,
begins writing )
Him (aside): Yeah, I'll know her alright, biblically speaking
Her (aside) What an asshole...I'll mess with his mind tonight and fuck him
over...
--Nadia Swerdlow