I love her in a trance. She loves me in vile defilement.
A public swimming pool. Mother and siblings (not D.) holding me down at the bottom. The water is still somewhat shallow here. But I let myself drown. There is no other way out.
The sea. Without violence, an object of considerable mass is placed on me. It can be a ship or a rock, a mountain, a lake added from the sky into the sea, buoys, a structure. The inside of my body is frozen. I sink in silence.
I dream I enter a sleeping trance as buildings collapse on top of me. The stones do not pierce my body; my trance seems to transform the collapse into a dream inside the dream, a sleeping state within sleep. Recursive entanglement; a layered maze of the mind.
I often dream that I let myself drown, because I no longer have the strength to fight.
At last, I'll be able to rest.
I jolt awake, torn out of the silence with a sharp gasp.
The work session that follows can still be more vibrant and warm than the gold of spring.
Dead Branches Inside of Us
The pain in my torso feels like dead branches inside — the nails and barbs of a reversed iron maiden cage that prevent me from moving.
My body is a place of pain, humiliation, and insecurity, and a place of uncontrollable paralysis that I despise more than anything.
My body is an enemy, or rather a wasteland I still have to inhabit.
This is what existence is for us: living in the unlivable, enduring what you are convinced you could never survive, yet was forced upon us.
Good sexual partners have moved beyond sex as ego-reinforcement.
They understand what it is to have been completely broken;
sex is no longer a celebration but the meeting of two shattered lands.
The flesh is held in the silence of the unspeakable, older than our memories.
The center is the unspeakable itself.
The events of the world appear at the periphery, like a hollow, endless pressure we have to bear.
But the mind invents a game, colors for a song, a desire for life perceived through some other sense. What sense?
The body will have to cross its own front lines, pushing past itself.
Of course it has to do with women. Again.
Broken, some know how to dance gracefully, often against gravity.
"Isn't gravity the lie of the world?"
Progress into the thickness of the unspeakable may come about through images and sensations that need to be given some kind of form and rhythm.
The dead branches inside the body may also be the missing names on the family tree — names erased when incest folded the branches back onto themselves.
These loops are imprints that never existed in reality, but only in fantasies, symbolic fractures, and destruction.
Here, everyone builds a maze for the others to enter.
But every door brings them back to that person alone — a trap, an obsession, a figure of death.
Inside whose psyche are we losing ourselves now?
What yearning for love became devouring, leaving the maze to trap us and digest us?
I may sometimes say that D. is either my wife or a complete stranger; my twin sister; a young aunt or a half-sister; a distant cousin; my sister but not my twin; my love, my favorite; the person I despise the most and my worst enemy; or that she is myself.
I sense that neither she nor I will ever manage to make this clear.
The maze alters itself when it slips into its own trance.
It echoes only inside itself, as if no outside existed.
The inner suffering is dreadful, and the feeling of loss seems to leave no way out for anyone involved here.
D. always frames events as a series of impossibilities where the most contradictory intentions must be seen as cumulative.
For example, kissing me on the lips might mean a great deal to her. But she'll only try if she has just given oral sex to some stranger, or if she is about to sexually reward the clients who purchased the recording of one of the massacres I suffered as a toddler.
She is the cameraman's daughter and this is what her life revolves around.
Yet this attempt to share a tender moment with me is certainly crucial for her, because she's in love with me.
Some live in horror.
It's her way of experiencing her love for me, and it is also her way of humiliating me. I believe that this humiliation is essential to her. She doesn't want me to forget her — using perverse schemes, she obviously tries to be a lingering soul too — and she cannot stand the idea of a reality that isn't destructive.
A reality that hasn't been soiled would force her to acknowledge that she has been systematically destroyed by her relatives since birth, and that we have been used like disposable toys.
I refuse to kiss her, but will I ever truly kiss another woman, when everything has already been destroyed? I also believe that most women would act the same way.
So I'm going to try to kill myself with cigarettes and coffee — just a little more of that today.
We might be the grotesque and horrifying image of a true love that can never exist in reality.
We are the absence of the world, searching for its scream long since devoured.
Trauma-bonded love is intense, contradictory, both perverse and pure. It can hardly fit in life.
Can dead branches be transformed, displaced somehow, so that leaves might be again — the green-gold leaves of a new victory over death and humanity?
Humans are destructive apes who live in groups and packs. One should not expect anything good from them beyond material provision. Therefore, I should not reproach them too harshly for anything: they do what their animal nature and their social context determine, and there is no hope of collective progress whatsoever.
But reality can bloom in places where humans do not keep watch to cut the throats of the flowers.
The Geminate Double
The impossibility of experiencing the bond in reality.
The reality of the bond as the experience of the impossible.
A primordial experience of an unbinding reality — tearing us away from the impossibility of living, and cutting us open in its slow-burning upheaval.
We love each other and we hate each other; we exhale contempt toward one another; we cannot stand each other. We are mad with love, and that love is pure. We desire each other into a deranged obscenity enacted with others — astonishing them. Animus, oh Anima: absolutes dripping with cum, with tears, and with swallowed howls, running onto others and into them, as we gnaw our apocalypses over and over, for liberation.
We live in the lack of one another and refuse to meet.
We are the blasts of a nuclear explosion to each other,
or a single twin-blast inherent in multiple detonations: poison mirrored with remedy, each to the other, in a terrible reflection.
A reciprocal mirror: each of us holds the part the other lost, like two halves of a single psychic core split too early. She is me — my beautiful one, did you miss me?
We are a primordial entanglement, older than ourselves: pure love's protection and obsessive destruction, cruelty and devotion. The acts are dramatic — the archaic hammering of attachment.
Here is an example. After a personal physical and psychological ordeal, I finally managed to sleep. When I woke up an image absorbed me. I am perhaps four years old. I am ill, suffering from an ear infection that forces me to remain in the dimness improvised in a room exposed to the full summer sun. I want only one thing — to go to the rocky beach to see D. and her sister. There she is, at the end of the street "over-inhabited" with geometric shapes. She is radiant, smiling and dark, her silhouette deeply darkened by the backlight; she appears to be thirty years old. She shows me her radiant face, her divine face, so different from her earthly one — the face no one else ever sees. It seems to me that an intense wave of love overflows me, escapes from me and fills the atmosphere of the whole earth. What exists, vaster than myself, is a pure vibrancy of clarified love flowing outward. I long to melt into her with love.
The next day, I undertook an action that should send her to prison.
I am Dionysus-Zagreus, and she is Ariadne. Whether I want it or not, I carry the sacred chaos; I love her, and she leads me through the pit — but only according to its laws.
She is my shadow-wife in sacred union.
And my unbearable, beloved little darling cumdumpster dogging bitch.
Love ought to be total fusion. The impossibility of that fusion — the horror of the human condition — led to the disasters of my childhood and of my whole life. Humans take revenge by eating raw what they can never merge with. I, who was torn apart by the rages of people whose longing to merge with me had slammed them into the ground of things and broken them, know how one devours one's own thoughts — and I forgive you, or perhaps I will forgive you someday. I think I may have forgiven you already.
What for? The walls are still closing in.
Our Burning Feather
I, too, betrayed you by forgetting.
A part of me participated in the rage of that forced desert.
Your despair is beyond my reach. I see you screaming, in tears, from your earliest years to today — lost and desolate. These images burst into my mind and overwhelm me for a while. For a few days, I stop blaming you for anything.
You're a little girl screaming, your eyes black with horror, under your parents' staircase. Then you're twenty, smiling at me in the streets of Paris, with an uncontrollable fury burning inside you. And now you're over forty, prowling around my place without ever speaking to me; your cry is now something pale and translucent on your skin.
Amnesia made me abandon you in order to survive. I would understand if you had taken revenge.
To be forgotten must be an unbearable feeling.
I don't know what abyss of erasure you had to face.
I hope other survivors won't resent me too deeply for saying this, but amnesia also has something inherently selfish in it. In order to survive, we shut things out, we tear holes in reality, and other people get pulled into that void with us.
I don't want to introduce guilt into survival — none of you need that, of course. But for myself, I also have to acknowledge that amnesia, and certain forms of dissociation, carry a kind of comfort. How many times lately have I caught myself thinking, simply to escape a moment that felt too painful or frightening, that I'd gladly just “dissociate hard” for a while? I don't do that anymore. On the contrary, I watch the early trances as they form, because they are entryways into amnesia. I forbid myself from crossing those thresholds. And yet, how tempting it would be sometimes to just pick up the eraser, let myself slip into a soft trance, maybe sleep a little to seal the process, and wake up without the memory of an event, a moment, a meeting, a heartbeat that struck too sharply — whatever it may be.
Of course, we only think this way once we are out of amnesia. As long as it rules us, we are merely its playthings, unaware of its processes and its methods. We are subjected to it, and it condemns us to live in a false world, or in a non-world. Amnesia is a fundamental deprivation of our connection to reality, to time, to others, and to our own capacity to create meaning. So I'm not trying here to equate it with simple denial or simple avoidance (although those may concern us as well, in other ways).
But we forget others for the sake of our own solitary survival. And if amnesia is so often denied by those who witness it again and again, it is also because of the terror they feel at the thought of being forgotten. My own case is extreme, and I can understand why some people have resented me — and why some have taken revenge.