Pale green skin (it's all for you)
When trying to recollect my first real encounter with visual disgust, or the abject, I always get stuck on a memory from when I was 7 or 8 years old. During choir practice, the choir leader showed my friends and I a picture he’d taken of a dead saint. He being a deeply religious man was so happy about this picture, and the encounter he had had with the saint. The saint was laying in a glass coffin, and was put on display in a church somewhere in Italy. Her skin was pale green and thin as paper. Sunken in so deep one could see the shape of her skull and every bone in her hands. She was dressed in a beautiful gown, and with lots and lots of golden jewellery. An absurd amount of decoration for such a small and fragile body.
Glaring at me.
Pushing me.
Making me go f o r w a r d.
You remind us of our own mortality, of our fragility.
Of our bodies decaying.
Of being a body without borders that hold the inside(s) together.
You crawl underneath my skin
and I surrender.
–
Now it is a ritual. It could even be called a performance. Same action, same repetition. I create the space and navigate the room, and whilst I do so I search for your eye. I do not meet your gaze, but I know that you are there. I move differently in front of you. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just part of the ritual. It’s delicate, but not fragile.
It is all for you.
In this place, this which I have created just for you and I, we can be alone for a while. It might be the only place for us. For me. The only place I can bear to comprehend and the only place I become comprehensible.
It is all for you.
But you and I are the same.
For you see, I’m so tired of trying to comprehend anything outside of this room. So tired of trying to make sense of a place that doesn’t make any sense to me.
(a feeling I suspect is mutual)
So tired.
–
When the picture, that was being handed around us children, finally reached me I remember my body jolting with horror so fast it even surprised me. I had never seen something like this, and couldn’t even imagine that a human body could look this way. Amidst my state of horror and fear, I was embarrassed. Did anybody notice how strongly my body reacted? Was I the only one who reacted this way? The same night, when laying in my bed, I cried to my mother. I was afraid that the saint was hiding under my bed. My mother was not happy with the choir leader.
(What do you want?)
You want to be seen. You want distortion. You want reaction.
Without it you would cease to exist.
(she needs that shiver as I need oxygen)
Seeing the dead saint as a child brought me too close to something I was far too young for. I couldn’t imagine my own mortality. I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see the dead body for what it was, just a body. In my mind that couldn’t exist. That wasn’t something that was supposed to be seen, and certainly not displayed. When you were dead, you were simply… gone. Therefore she must have been alive. Not in the same way as me, that much I could understand. But as a monster, straight out of a nightmare.
I am looking for something that doesn’t please a place that asks us to please it without saying please and thank you in return.
It only demands and I am too stubborn to conform.
After that first encounter with the saint I tried to forget her. It did not work. So I started to look for her. I did not find her. I searched and searched, but in the end it was she who found me. Not in a physical form, nor in a visual. But through the notion of abjection. We started to speak a language only we understood. We started to feed off each other. Giving the other part what they were craving. I was craving disturbance. She was craving my fear, for me to retch, for my body to convulse.
–
This place outside of our room has already cast us out or maybe we did it first and as much as I am stubborn, I am petty. They want to place us aside and outside and away? Well look at us embracing our position that was meant for begging to be let back inside again, inside of them. But inside my self-created chamber of wanting/needing/processing/developing I strive. I feed.
I submerge:
Myself.
You.
Us.
It.
No one in particular.
But maybe mostly probably certainly the moment. But that’s its own category. I let it feed off me as well. This relationship goes both ways. For I desire.
I (desire) structure.
No.
I desire. (period)
Structure frustrates me.
–
When. Everything. Feels. Stagnant.
You provide disruptioN.
When all the questions are answered.
You ask another question.
You create a G A P I N G hole. And that is where I find inspiration.
That is what I want from you. What I need from you.
(so you see, we need each other)
What I really want is to escape and I want it to devour me, as I devour it.
(Tear the skin of my body with your sharp gleaming teeth. Indulge on my flesh. It is yours now.)
Oh the joy of wanting to look away, for this means that I am pushed beyond, beyond, beyond, beyond a hermeneutic idea of order. An idea with set rules that don’t apply to me.
Just like you.
For that rule breaking I am called a monster and I very much like to be one.
Just like you.
They don’t want me. They loathe me and I loathe them.
Just like you.
They loathe me and I loathe them thewy loathe me an d I loathe lthejnm Theyu loath me and I loathe tgen Il kiqw6g4 5h4m nr 6h4y low6hh4 m4 wnr 6h4y low6h4 mn4 wbr U KI5H4 6H4J4M Wqnbr I KITH4 THEM ABD THEY KIATGE NE ABD U KIATGE RGE
Let’s try this again.
Containing substantial meaning or made up meaning, again in a way for us to make sense of something that doesn’t want to be described with their words.
They don’t suit me (you). They don’t fit me (you). They don’t belong to me (you).
I say this with clenched teeth and in their retelling of our encounter, I am transformed into a saber toothed monster.
This position is a conundrum, you say.
My only response is a hiss.
(I don’t know which positions point this is proving.)
But nevertheless, their wor(l)ds can’t possibly obtain everything that I consist of. They never thought of me while creating these wor(l)ds. Or maybe They did, but for other reasons. Not out of understanding, or even misunderstanding, but out of hatred. Out of that blinding redness that they don’t want to admit to.
Beg me, you say.
But I don’t evert my eyes.
I sink deeper in.
I join you.
Without fear and without the ending of time. I just join you.
Swallow me.
(My loneliness remains)
Oh the horror of spit and shit and bile and vomit and and and. It’s that shiver that runs up and down your spine. You know which one I’m talking about. With that quenching feeling somewhere in the pit of your stomach. You think of bodies without constraint. You think of death and decay and you hurl and in that moment you become one of them.
(Just as I did)
A split second.
A split second and me and my body no longer operated in the same space.
A split second, and you gauged my eyes out. They are yours now. Yours to do whatever you
want with them.
It is all for you.