bodies

Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well. It is 2024 and it is snowing now. This will be scattered.

I want to learn languages no one speaks so I can say whatever I want and mean none of it. We make the meaning. We are the signs and the signified. It is cold again, but in a lovely way. The snow makes the world so bright. Coffee in the morning and wine at night. Secularity is false, ritual remains.

What do you believe? I was ten years old when I realized one day I will die. It was then that family and friends became bodies. I have lived existentially, eschatologically ever since. Every decision I have made has been made staring directly into nothing forever.

I have been reading Dennis Cooper. He writes about violence sexually and sex violently. His scenes are mosaics of adolescent nightmares, moving images superimposed over one another, black and white and red; exclusion, color burn, difference, overlay. Not the awkward, clammy hands and rapid heartbeats, David Sedaris adolescence, but the homemade porn, prolapsed asshole, cigarette burn, bleeding cock, and mescaline adolescence. It is disgusting and I would never recommend his books to anyone I thought had a shot in life. I cannot help but find beauty in it all. Maybe I am sick. I am surely sick.

I was ten years old when I realized one day my mother will die. That hurt the most. On a first date a few years ago, a man four years my senior asked me where I would like to be when the world ends. I said being held by my mother, my ear against her chest. I want to feel the warmth she creates and hear her heartbeat louder than anything. It took eight months for him to break my heart three times. I was balding then, dying from some illness I could never pin down. My pediatrician told me it was stress and my psychiatrist said it was the meds. I take Prozac so I don’t have to count my every step. It used to take me five minutes to finish speaking a sentence. I had to count all the consonants in every word to make sure the “sharp” ones (K,S,T,C,P) were spoken in pairs of three. Door knobs are much easier now.

I have been quite the voyeur since I was young. I remember sitting in class in middle school watching gore on my phone tucked under the desk. I’d show my only friend something terrible and he’d go to the bathroom to vomit and then after ask me to send him the link. His parents were getting divorced and he’d jerk off five times a day. Maybe that is why I love Dennis Cooper, because somewhere in my mind is a kaleidoscopic collage of all the worst images imaginable. I remember a video of a man collapsing to the ground in a crowded shopping mall, his eyes looking at his hands and his hands covered in blood spraying out of his throat. I remember a mother hanging herself in front of her children. The Internet allows these things. After 9/11, all kids want is to see something truly terrible. New colors, new beauty.

There was blood by Tracy Emin

I make couples out of strangers. I imagine two men sharing dinner in bed with one another. I imagine the one in the brown sweater and the round glasses kissing the tall, skinny redhead on the cheek, the mouth, the chest, the abdomen, the groin, the penis, his tongue working his way around the bright orange pubes and picking the tip of the penis up and into the mouth. It is wet and warm and getting bigger and the man with the round glasses is tearing up trying not to choke. The redhead has his pillow over his face because his walls are thin and his roommates don’t like it when they can hear him crying.

I read Bulgakov’s Morphine. The doctor dying from his morphine addiction states, “air is insubstantial.” It’s true, morphine dominates the mind and leaves no space for beauty. It becomes beauty. For a moment, there is nothing better; there is nothing else. I remember the pain in my eye, my skull, my brain. It felt stalactite, capillaries of ice working their way through my brain matter and leaving me with nothing but vomit all over my shirt and palms soaked in blood from squeezing my fingernails into my own skin. Some pain meds don’t work on me. Morphine either brings me into nirvana or almost kills me. I will never forget the hospital chaplain praying with my parents. My father said my skin turned green then yellow then white then my life left my eyes. All these drugs, administered by doctors and nurses who just wanted to help me not feel like my head was collapsing into a singularity. The doctor administered Narcan and I woke up, threw up, and laughed.

I met a man. I was sitting in this surreal, peaceful Chinese cafeteria I frequent and this charming man in a burgundy sweater sat parallel to me. The words in my headphones felt inadequate and I suddenly knew I had to ask this man a question. I picked up my tray and sat across from him. His face was cute, boyish, but somewhat messily put together in the kind of way you mostly see in Brits and Irishmen. His eyes were sunken and his hands shook anxiously. His legs were crossed at the ankles and his knees oscillated, eyes stared straight down into his food.

 “Did you have a strange dream last night?” He answered the question immediately.

“I dreamt I was in a bowling alley I used to go to in London. I was with my brother. We were bowling and hanging out, nothing special, but really it was special because I never see him anymore. It was really nice. Then, this girl showed up. I have been obsessed with her for years. She’s like a kind of anima for me or something. She told me something and then walked away and I knew I needed to follow her so I did but I just couldn’t catch up to her. I was shouting her name, Imogen, but I just couldn’t get her attention no matter how loud I yelled. I ended up somewhere else entirerly. I felt bad I’d abandoned my brother. He was bowling all alone. He’s a meth addict now, so I don’t see him much anymore. He’s twenty-seven.”

Stanley, that was his name, told me throughout his life he has always been obsessed with women, one at a time and often for many years. He said Imogen was perfect, like the Platonic ideal of a woman. “She had this curly hair.” I knew what he meant.

Amelie had this curly hair too.

I miss my finger beneath her chin, gently pointing her eyes up so they’d catch the light just right. I miss her arm draped over my chest. Her hand in my hair. She would grab my hands and say, “you have such amazing hands.” I didn’t know how to tell her when I saw her skin I forgot about death. I didn’t tell her much of anything. She would teach me how to say things in French I have since forgotten. Amelie, you; I miss you saying things you knew I’d never understand. I miss you trying to explain them to me in your English. You’d get most of the words but forget a few key adjectives. You’d describe the world as enchanted, juicy, comfortable. I want to wake up knowing you are there. You said Yo La Tengo sounded “scary” (another strange adjective), so we’d make love and dance to bossa nova. The other night, in a moment of weakness, I asked if you wanted to come see my new place. You told me we’d have to do something particularly fun to convince you to get out of bed, to change out of your pajamas, and make your way across town. I thought I would kiss you. You said you don’t love me that way anymore.

Stanley had these eyes. These eyes that tell you just how lost they are, yet just how sure they are in their direction. I wanted to see his body. I wanted to see just how warm he could make my bedsheets. I wanted to see the arch of his penis, the direction it points, and the drape of his balls. How is it all framed? When he lays flat on his stomach, does his ass gradually become his thighs or does it perch, state its presence? Before parting, Stanley invited me to a money burning party. He told me to bring just enough cash that it will hurt to burn. He sent me a text the next day asking if I knew any good therapists or psychology students above their age in maturity. I told him no and he said he was sick in bed with a cold, watching some Russian movie. He studies theoretical astrophysics, something to do with making a telescope a kilometer in length. He apologized for cursing, and I told him that it’s okay.

eenie meenie miney mo by Hank Lumen

My professor said we used to live in the Kosmos and now we live in the universe. We have reduced place to space. He said it had something to do with nominalism leading to secularism as a product of Protestantism and Christian Neo-Platonism. If the signs signify nothing, and all things are equidistant from transcendence, meaning must be made by each individual like sandcastles out of broken glass. He said belief is a choice now and that in ancient times belief was never even considered. He seems to know everything. I told him some garbage about Jung’s collective unconscious serving as a sort of replacement for the Kosmos and the PhD’s in the class laughed at how deeply I had misinterpreted everything set before me. My professor said we have run out of teloi and must find them within ourselves. Our place in this world is something we must construct rather than being self-evident.

I would agree if I believed in anything at all. If we are truly building sandcastles out of broken glass, constructing our own teleologies, we are surely doing a poor job. The world is burning, everyone knows this. We find teloi in one another. I find teloi in your eyes. All moments led to this one. Every millisecond the world is created, destroyed, recreated. Consistency is nothing less than miraculous. I see your eyes. You see mine. Miracle.

I am still not over the Australian man. I never heard from him. My friends tell me he treated me poorly. I don’t know if he treated me at all. I existed alongside him, seemingly completely unaffecting the currents of his world. All I know is that in this world of sharp edges, he seemed to be something smooth. I am not in love with him because I do not know him. He never gave me anything to love. I built it all myself, surely out of broken glass. But there was something. That cannot be denied. It was obvious. You could see it in his eyes. That night he came to my show, his smile, the creases around his eyes, the way he cheered and waved his arms like the wind was in question. His lean against the bar. His arm around my waist. There is something terrifying about feeling. There is something much more terrifying about feeling for another.

The loves of my life are all people who cannot exist, surely not in the same universe. They are all uncreated creators, boundless and infinite. I like brown hair. I like eyes that tell me how much they know. I like eyes that tell me how little they know. Dating apps will one day all explode. I “match” with someone and we talk for a few weeks and then I see them digitally for years. We have acknowledged our mutual attraction and that is that. There’s something wrong about it all. I am sure the history textbooks will clear it up. Something about “parasocial” this or “transactional” that. We need prophets. Young men are looking to Jordan Peterson for oracles and it is killing them. Not to be a pessimist, but everything great about modernity is destroying itself. Algorithmic healthcare, automated therapy, trauma quiz, infinite personality spectrums, locating yourself within a world of absolutely nothing but nonstop webpages and automatically generated perfection. Break yourself down to your smallest parts and see how they move and judge them for that. Never forget that there is something ontologically wrong with you and you will never fix it. This, I am told. No more free advertising. None of this is sustainable. We replaced “sin” with the “problematic”. I am not religious. I am a product of my time. The language I speak, the images I draw from, it is all woven within the web of post-modernity. I am not an idiot; I won’t claim to be outside of my time. The loves of my life seem to break this endless scroll. They disrupt the algorithmic march and artificially generated pornography. I feel their skin and electricity suddenly becomes something I can understand completely and have always understood. Cancel your insurance plans and spend all your money on food and art. Print everything. Write everything down. Photograph everything. Make a website and fill it with all the worst moments of your life. Feed the algorithms nothing but necrosis. Find beauty in something. I am talking to myself. I am living my life eschatologically. I can’t help it.