the habit of being

To explore medium-sized navy polka dots on a transparently thin silk skirt, mid-calf-length:

First ponder: the way a masculine hand can rest on a feminine thigh, even lower, near the knee, even through clothes. They can be transparently thin as mentioned, or rough as old art-jeans with splatters for dots. These are the kind that aren’t flattering at all, too loose in the rear due to gauntass disease and the legs just can’t be narrow enough. The thickness of the waist is accentuated, when you’ve always wanted a waist like a sheet of paper or a drinking straw or something, anything, insignificant. Even so, yes, you’re wearing them dirty for days. Still he touches her leg with such a glaringly possessive expression just shining from every blue vein, tiny hair, conspicuous bone. It is obvious in the way the thumb will rub back and forth, tiny motion, maybe in a slightly circular pattern, saying something of I own you, something of I am you, something of I cherish you, something of I’ll protect you, something of I want you, now.

Then: the texture of the skin beneath, and how it adds to things, and the warmth, and the yearning. The way legs are for wrapping around things. And how they can be so long.

The art-jeans are mine, folded up in an old drawer somewhere, with my favorite art-t-shirt, with just the right combination of smeared fingerprints along the hem. The silk polka dots are children of a stranger, it is the silhouette of some skinnyprettygirl’s thigh in my visage, not my own, and that hand belongs to no lover of mine, and oh how I would like to break his wrist, to smash them both into atoms, and scream to all in the theatre that my hands are like that too, only more fragile, and I have owned hands like that, worshipped hands like that, prayed both with and for hands like that.

. . .

Make us a little house with a plant and a good rug, or an apartment in New York City. Make it the tiniest place in the world, with room only for two hearts, four hands, and the beginning of light. A corner to hide in, but so close it’s not truly hidden, and a shower, where I can sit with my eyes pressed hard against my knees, watching darkness and capillary lightning, as the water streams down over me, a waterfall in a cherry I always said, and some things never change. I’ll lean back and let the hot water massage my sinuses, let it fill my mouth, and then spit it out against the tile, and you’ll be somewhere close, somewhere I’ll always be able to reach you. Everything will be colors, red for Mondays, teal for Tuesdays, and I’ll no longer be the only one to see them. (Maybe we’ll list the Good Words of the Day on the walls: lachrymose, parenchyma… )

No one else has ever seen as much as you, I know, I just know, because you look at me like you understand, and no one else ever has. Something about the way you take pictures of ordinary things, it makes it seem like nothing could ever be ordinary to you, least of all me, because you see every tiny thing no else notices, and no, I am not the same when we’re apart. So make us a cardboard box in the middle of the street to get rained on, or a hole in the ground where we can sit and read poems to one another, because neither of us knows how to say it, and both of us are still afraid.

. . .

In a past life I may have been a mock Spanish dancer, with some fake red flowers in my dyed-black hair (not in a gothic way, oh no, not like a raven’s feathers, but like something more permanent, black automobile touch-up paint). I might have moved in a way that wasn’t stilted, I might have had love affairs with strangers and enjoyed it. I might not have been so sensitive, and maybe I never worried about the reasons for making art. Maybe I kept a journal I let no one read, maybe I was content. I bet when I was a mock Spanish dancer I never took pictures of myself naked, and if I did, it never occurred to me to show them to anyone else. Maybe my waist was small and my breasts were perfect, maybe I had very white teeth. If my eyes were the sort that look all the more lovely in black and gold frocks, I probably dressed them every morning and never checked to see that the lines weren’t smeared, because I didn’t need an excuse to look at myself, and I didn’t need to tie cherry stems in knots with my tongue. No one needed to tell me I was a good lover, or that I had the capacity to become one over time, or that no, I really wasn’t just making a fool of myself all those years, all those dances. Just a thought.

( In reality I have Tereza’s view of polygamy, it would tear me apart. But for hours I stab myself (metaphorically) for needing this website and for needing other people in general when I make things (I call my art “things” because I don’t always presume so much). I know it to be infinitely more pure, more right, more real to make things solely for the sake of making them. To write only because I must. And it is true that I must, but why must I put those words, these words, here, out in the light, when I could keep them safe and free of misunderstanding, keep myself from prostitution, just by letting them lay unread by anyone? Why can’t I do that, when it seems so easy, so simple? I have tried, oh have I tried. This upsets me more than any other flaw, and here I sit whining about it, knowing somewhere someone will read my silly pleas and maybe, just maybe, relate to them. This, my beloved audience, is why I can’t dance. )

. . .

From circles to squares

My new project, vapid and clean. Like I said, design is much cleaner than art (sorry the image is blurry and glare-ish):

(img lost to time)

96 2.5″x2.5″ squares. 22 are blank. The images are from 2000 Prada advertisements (the year 2000, not literally). Still working on the “theme.” Uncle Leo would not be proud. Oh, Uncle Leo would not be proud. Composition, juxtaposition, still I hide my face in shame. Uncle Leo would not be proud.

Still, simplicity. Yet I think it is wrong to say simplicity is nothing but the acknowledgment of complexity. There is a certain amount of breaking down that must be done, actively, say the putting of things in squares. Not a fight against entropy, I don’t mean that, but rather a quest for contentment. Even meditation must be practiced. I’m already contradictory (When E, lover of chaos theory, said she was all about complexity, I said I was all about simplicity, adding later the addendum that they were the same thing, really.), but I know it is not so easy, even given the Eastern obsession, pearls and scrolls, and how things like Crouching Tiger… (I could think of nothing but the past) seem so real to me, oddly. Duality is a force as thick as shells, each infinitely small.

Real art is more like integrals, only the opposite. Revolve the image about the abscissa and find the volume of the solid using the washer method. I still have this crazy calculus fetish, though my math instruction has always been horribly inferior.

real science (about the closest I get to humor)
ERROR: MT and TM were rather prone to knocking their little plant baby out of its potometer, sending it screaming to the cold hard labroom floor. We probably all screwed up reading the little numbers correctly from time to time; I know my eyes begin to fail me. D moved (”slightly tilted”) the fan in the middle of the wind experiment, throwing the readings off at the beginning. There might have been some air-bubblage in the potometer tubes. M and I probably breathed in the presence of some important lab apparatus, throwing the readings off at least 20%, the mark of the lab-retard. Red stars flash before my eyes.

. . .

I’m in the den watching a pretty movie with a lot of sex scenes, and the rest of my family is in the kitchen making sandwiches and soup. My little brother walks in periodically. Shots of a woman in orgasm, she is nude, moaning. (I took my own orgasm-photos, you know. Thought I looked rather typical. Maybe we have these expressions melted into us at an early age.) Someone calls from the other room, asking if he wants to play a game. I feel silly, like I should explain myself to them, and yet I’m in that floaty movie-watching state, wanting to be something art-like. They aren’t really talking to me today anyway. It is still odd. Worth mentioning, though I did a poor job of it. There are no moors here, not a castle falling down, or any hopes of winter cold. The rain falls in such a way that it seems to know sadness without symbol is twice as bad. No one is yelling at me, yet the echoes still remain. Contrary to what some may think, I do not keep secrets. The secret-keeper is a dominatrix all in black, when it is all I can do to find a hand to slap me.