IVORY
If I am going to create this virtual map of the body for you I need to start with the ivory, which most accurately can be described as an indifferent light vibrating so rapidly the image takes on mass and appears constant to the blunt eyed, in the way film is a rapid succession of images. Its
voice is lush silence. Its particles materialize like ribbons sealed around the body horizontally, the first looping at the crown of my head, the next where spine joins skull, supporting the flailing neck of perpetual infancy. I’m a baby sucking my thumb. Don’t shake me. It then loops around where neck meets jawline, as if to taunt choking to an audience gathered round the dumb mind of undifferentiated bliss. I think of everyone killed by autoerotic asphyxiation. Don’t let it be me. I refuse to jerk off into two dimensional projections. But isn’t that eroticism. Isn’t that the fantasy. I don’t want the fantasy. I want to be cannibalized by God. The erotic is the bastard of eros.
The ivory charge doesn’t play. Perhaps, at least in this moment, I’m relying too much on the flip side of ivory’s chaotic violence to paint it for you, like understanding a life through its death. Again, we have a corpse to dissect in some teleologic way. And it’s hard to escape the implicit
vulnerability of the body as I transcribe it, its precarity when some part is taken out of the world. To experience rapture is to be raped by God, but I give myself over. Still, there’s this question of consent. What if I am taken too far. And what of the brutality of a selfhood effaced when two subtle bodies enter the void. As a woman, my life is already expected to be swallowed up into another’s. But its not him that swallows me. Its the thing that swallows us. This is a hard death to venture back from. He whispers through my tunnel of tears and convulsions, “Lets come back
and enter the space. We are in West Oakland. We are in Lobot. We are laying in your bed in your loft. Smell the ginger tea. Touch the hanging plant. ” He grabs my hand, but I cannot sensate a way of differentiating our bodies and the terror of this haunts so many of my bodies.