bosnia, bosnia, edwin

     

and in progress

            When you wake up in a house on the upper west side next to a 20 year old wearing his absent mother’s silk robe, and the bracelet you bought in Sarajevo a week prior is broken, to which his response is, “it was trashy, anyway,” you feel as though you might be a bit misplaced. You think for a moment about where you lie, at least spatially. You can’t orient the causality in the events that led you into this space; you couldn’t recite the story to another person if they even asked, because the story wouldn’t feel like your story to narrate. You feel dismembered from your self, you feel as though the concept of “self” is not exactly valid at this moment; the thousand thread-count sheets and sparse town car traffic close in on you so comfortably that your momentary inclination to really assess the situation you’re in flees from the scene just as easily as you have fled from your responsibility to “self”.

Still, you can’t avoid that you feel pathetic, unethical, meaningless, cavernous. A series of anti-attempts to cultivate your voice have brought you to this comfortable place. You had told yourself that it was time to start living unhinged from the voices of others who dictate what or who you should be; you had made the break into simply acting in accordance to your desires, refusing to suppress any desire of your own because if it is “yours,” you should actualize it. And then your self may reveal itself to you in all of its desirous plentitude; and then you might really produce as a result of having finally crafted yourself in harmony to what you have always wanted.

Your hair is curled, you’re a bit too fat, you’ve spent a good chunk of your grant money on discounted clothes you can’t afford otherwise, you can’t find the Serbian liquor you had the night before but take a bottle of Pernod instead, you wait for your 20 year old to call a driver, and you bask in the complete emptiness of your every move.

In response to Alex (Ruin Porn)

 Waterwash. Something last-named Waterwash fucked her up, pushed her to the wall and made her bruise before I was even conceived and ten years later another rendezvous in alcoholics anonymous would lead her to the wall again with me at age 12 stepping silly on sticky floors because a case of Corona was thrown in defense against a barstool situated before a petty regal marble countertop, installed by the man who cut his fingers off while installing hardwood floors in her dining room. This man taught me Heart of Gold on the guitar in a cape-cod entertainment room, 64 inch television set playing Degrassi in the background, seven-hour trips to Asheville in the back of both of our minds. She splayed herself to us, two hours into the drive refusing to get back into the car at a rest stop in Kentucky just almost at the real peaks of the Appalachian mountains. If they had been real at the point of her departure we may have taken her more seriously. Me dreaming about being a submissive man in the back of a dirty white Ford Escort, my brother making himself gag in a carseat to my right.

In response (kind of) to Aliza Shvartz:

I am interested in the kind of dispossession that leaves traces of disgust and confusion. The type of failure that is so masochistic the audience asks, “but why?” To which even the performer cannot adequately respond. It is not in order to achieve “shock” and it is not throw-away performance for the sake of masochism. There is an affective quality to masochistic acts that is not achievable under any other circumstances.

I want to test the malleability of flesh. Because I possess a feminine body, I have experienced the malleability of my own flesh through the bodies of others, while I am myself an Other. However, I have never been able (as a consequence of this "Otherness" as much as my own failures/shortcomings) to access myself either as this Other or as a corporeal, speaking, breathing, living, acting subject at all. I have disallowed myself access to my own voice and my own body for as long as I can remember. Even masturbation has always been a traumatic event. I dissociate from my own body and the whole event seems a pleasurable storm of disembodiment and a re-inscription of past traumas through my own hands (especially because I don’t feel as though my flesh is actually my own).

It doesn’t matter with whom I’m engaging in “sex-acts” with, even if it is myself. A ghost of a person is always touching me, as a shadow, traces of trauma and simply the gazes of others and what I read into (and out of) them.

I was anorexic for five (give or take a few here and there) years and did not know it. It took a year of sporadic bulimia for me to grant myself the agency to claim “bulimic” and seek medical help. Just as sex-acts are ways to dissociate from myself and live through the flesh of others, bingeing and purging provided a means with which to short-circuit; to access a plane of affect that I do not have access to in my day to day life. This isn’t a sort of reaching for the Real; my acts of masochistic transcendence weren’t efforts to reach a state of being that is irreconcilably inaccessible to all bodies. It’s rather a way to feel something in the act of complete dispossession and self-inflicted debasement. In some ways, to feel as though I am saying something, that I am able to say something, even if (especially if?) only to myself, to my own body, with my own flesh.

I have engaged in spontaneous acts of privileged consumerism. I have identified with objects in an effort to forge an intelligible identity. I have attempted to merge my own skin with the lavender walls of my room, the intricately patterned linens on my bed, my bed the site of sex and the site of identity formation and the site of identification with others and the site of all of my attempts to identify with myself through the flesh of others. A separation from the objects I have deemed significant in my repertoire is like a separation from a lover that I have never had. Once, my home was infested with bed bugs. I threw away everything that I owned in a fit of liberation and I still have not recovered.

ways in which the wall can love back (2006)

I am enamored by negativity because I identify with it. I want to make it clear, however, that I do not view negativity or regression as my goal, or any goal for purely ethical reasons. However, I question the relevance of a “goal” at all, focusing rather on iterations, of acts that perhaps do not lead to a cumulatively understandable “goal.” This isn’t to say that one cannot attempt to capture a certain amount of space within a certain amount of time and understand what is contained within as a product of lived experiences, social realities, embodiment. However, I would argue that no genealogy of cause and effect exists. As thrilled as I am with negativity, failure, dispossession, disembodiment, I have (perhaps naïve) hope in utopia. In futurity. Perhaps an interlacing of failure and success is necessary for any futurity at all – the debasement of oneself can sometimes act as a crude reminder of work that still must be done. This is not an alignment with any sort of teleological understanding of history; nor am I aiming to legitimize any harm inflicted on selves or others as necessary events in the name of “progress” or “improvement.” Instead, certain acts of negativity, failure, and dispossession can become punctums with which to understand and empathize with others and, of course, with selves – selves that span time and space in often indigestible ways. 

this is a start

My obsession with this book is violent. It’s self-loathing self-destructive and self-serving. After I dated an anorexic drug addict from Pittsburgh, I started “dating” some fake boyfriends, spoiled rich 19 year olds from Manhattan with personalities I thought were malleable. I pretended like I didn’t care about them, that I could maneuver the world like Julia, through boys through their bodies through their bodies through my body, in my body, I pretended like it wouldn’t hurt me. I pretended like I could act as if everything was capital and I should embrace it and everything would be okay. I pretended like I could assume the bodies of others. I sold all of my records. I didn’t care about my books. I trashed all of the material possessions that had sentimental value and I only cared about what touched my body. Silk shirts, cashmere, only the most expensive material. Dry-clean only. Fabric bitch. Glorified whore. Expensive looking. Don't fucking touch me. Red wool coat with a belt. Makes you look hungry. I stopped eating. I used people because I thought they would use me in the end, anyway. I don’t know where this is going.

Paris, 2009. I am sitting in a park off of the Saint-Michel metro stop. I am reading Hopscotch on a bench and there are three American boys with bikes and polos talking about Moliere next to me. I don’t care. I am dressed in black, knit fabrics I’ve cut, with my backpack and Julio Cortazar. A pigeon shits on me. Lands right on my black pants. I don't care. The next day, I would wake up in someone’s grandfather’s flat in the Latin Quarter, in a room lined with shelves full of books, the windows open, sheer cream-colored curtains contorting gently and periodically grazing my feet. The people I sat with all of the night before had been perfect people to maneuver through, though I was not maneuvering anything. Paris is tall, it eats you up so you don’t have to consume in order to feel less anxious. It’s tall and winding. This is the Paris I remember and wanted to recreate in 2013. Paris in 2013 was me in the body of Julia, except I was the one paying for everything. It was dark, hidden, commercialized, loud, fast, drunk, blacked-out, I was splayed out on a table in a theater, it was cold, rainy, slippery, I was bloated, drunk on Ricard, bloated on a table waiting for incision, my skin showing its veins and clenched tight to my bones, I ate duck, I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t think. The apartment in Clichy was small, I was trapped by a room with bare sterile walls and a table in the middle holding up a bottle of Zubrowka that I had to finish. With a loud drunk from Philadelphia. I kissed him because I felt like I had to. I couldn’t orient myself in space. Space that couldn’t save me anymore.

I want to know the meaning of an orange. I want to stay in hotels. I want to be moving, keep moving. I want to keep moving until I find that place that I feel continuous with again. I felt continuous on the train from Prague to Paris. I felt continuous at times with Manhattan last year, but only because I was delusional. Bialowieza. Macia and I lay in a field, where the houses stopped. They stopped and there was just a field, a large field and on the other side of the field there was the forest. There were houses, and field, and then the forest. We lay in the field, and at midnight, the lights went out. We saw all of the stars. I saw the whole sky in him. I didn’t love him but I did and I do. We wanted to crash the Polish wedding, but we only stood by the windows and listened to the dancing. The grass was wet and I sat on the windowsill and smoked cigarettes while he filmed me. The woman who owned the house gave me a parasol and a raincoat. California, mon amour. Polish pop hit. Time. Three years later I would have an inexplicable desire to go to school in California.

I am seated on a chair. Mindfulness exercises tell you to sit, to sit in one position, to feel the connection of your feet to the ground or your body to the seat or your hands to each other, and to focus on the connection, where your body ends and the objects begin, but I cannot locate that point of connection. Surprise, nerve conduction velocity fucks you again, the time it takes for the world to actually reach your brain and for your brain to react, to transform it into something else, it’s always too late and it’s so late that it never even happens. But I can feel the floor beneath my feet and after awhile, after awhile of focusing on my the touch of my body to the floor, my body feels like it is the floor. There is no separation. It’s like when you stare at a teacher in front of a white board for awhile, and she starts to glow, and you can’t see the rest of the room anymore. Has she taken the room away from you? Or when you’re in the bathtub and the water is the same temperature as your body and you forget that you’re naked in a tub of water and if you went under long enough you could die while forgetting where you are. What is my body’s relation to inanimate objects, let alone animate ones? When I look at someone, am I touching him or her? Because I feel like all of the people who have ever looked at me have run their hands up and down my body and I want to scream.