by Camille Roy
(Seph Weene)
As a sensualist living under threat, I have incorporated threat. My complicity is violent. Head unwinding newsreels of gore where I am never the victim, sometimes the sadist. My switchblade my first boyfriend gave me is always in my pocket (I made that up) and so on. For practice, my beloved and I often fight with rubber knives. We are deliberate. For example we were both wearing leather jackets, crew cuts, and eating spaghetti in a roomy restaurant called the Grand Piano when she told me this:
You know the Panhandle. Big streets rim a basketball court, a bathroom used by local communists who for years have refused to pay their water bills, and eucalyptus, cypress, also bushy thickets. Were you aware those thickets are inhabited by hermits who never come out but who can be seen with paper bags over their heads muttering in the interior. She leans forward and talks out of the side of her mouth. Well, several years ago one of the hermits ventured from this sanctuary, and his head fell off. He was found sitting on a park bench with the (McDonald’s) paper bag still on his head, and it wasn’t for several months that his head was found, by some kids, playing in a clump of uninhabited bushes.
I respond by telling this story:
This is a story about the SUPERIORITY of fear. If I only had a brain. After you’ve eliminated everything else, what you’re left with is the truth. I’m no dummy. “No one saw him upset but he was very upset.” The postcard he sent me had ‘Black Mischief’ written in pretty script on the bottom. Two black kittens had their eyes scratched out and blood was dripping out of the sockets. The next card showed Jesus knocking on a door; he had scrawled “Time & Time Again” on the back. Finally he quit trying to stomp on my feet and started to chase me. It fascinated me the way his mouth was moving up and down but no noise came out. I crossed the street. He didn’t know what hit him. He landed on all fours splayed across two lanes. The next car swerved but flattened his head. It crunched like a vase and the blood splashed out thin and watery. There was a long red tire track. I thought of the scarecrow stuffing straw into himself. Someone on the other side of the street looked like he was trying to run but couldn’t move his feet. His fingers wiggled. There must have been noise but I don’t remember any. It felt like my body was touching itself in relief, all over hot flashes, and I sat down on the sidewalk behind a parked car and waited for the police.
My beloved and I go to Mitchell Bros. to see Fran’s act. Fanny is her stage name which I ought to use here. Fanny Fatale. A bush of yellow hair in the shadowy warm room; the men all have flashlights. We do too, but I feel obliged not to use mine. Her beautiful legs give me a swelling feeling of contentment. The pleasure of looking where all the men are shining their flashlights. She strips as she works the room, giving us more and more honey-colored skin. The men are inaugurating a young man in some sort of sexual ritual. One says he’ll be a snot with his girlfriend now that he thinks he knows something. Fanny approaches him with arms straight out; his smile is painfully stiff; the other men giggle and hoot. I’ve heard about how obedient they are. She lifts her leg into his face, plays with herself, takes money. When she comes to us she lays in my girlfriend’s lap, grabs her breast then rolls onto me. I’m a fool like the men. She whispers do you like this place, I say yeah I like the temperature.
Touch is relatively untouched, why is that. Perhaps what we see is more heavily constituted by ideology. Describing my beloved, I am consistently opposed by some (sexual?) incongruity. Writing her ‘looks,’ her body is an underivable effect. Until the image leans down into touch (shadow meets body) this is porn. Otherwise it is like trying to match what is visible through the keyhole with my desire.
Mobility implies sharp judgement, ideological pressure.
Writing touch, I am hardly opposed at all. It enters the text, fills it up, slices it like conversations. An aggressive democracy of fucking. Is this idealism?
An individual can resist only to a certain degree and at some point necessarily succumbs. But it is the way in which they succumb, the angle of submission, that is often interesting…
(Charles Bernstein)
I lean back on my elbow, take a long drag on a cigarette. My beloved—slack, casual—leans thru the doorway. Telling a story which recedes in the middle, her brown irises drift away like slow breath, irony disperses to points. She wears a coon cap and baggy charcoal pants. Her hands have a way of sliding up; self-deprecation takes a sexual edge. Eyebrows arched away from me, what slips out between her even teeth: a faint hiss.
Shelley, dressing, hides herself in the kitchen. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands…is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply…
(Guy Debord)
When she comes out, Shelley is wearing a tight shiny red dress. She gets up on the rippling bed. We all watch round, high, round breasts appear as she pulls it off. Watching a body acquire itself—linked, smoothed—nude is an idea of unity smeared across the joints. The torso sliding out, a warm paste. Grinding hips and shoulders. Everyone leans forward, wondering how much we’ll get to see. A garter whizzes past my head. I lean back in my lawn chair, gratified, laughing. She gets it all off, lip synching to a song about men, furs, opera: “The pleasures of being a woman.” Then my beloved tells her she’s running out of time. Rolling her hips, she pulls on fuzzy sweatpants, soft as her moustache. Next a t-shirt. As the song ends Shelley swings towards us grabbing a baseball mitt and cap.
In Shelley’s story, the monster metamorphosed into an ordinary little girl. She’s trying to make the distinction sticky. That narrow smile means he thinks I’m too cute to be single.
Consider the word “gay.” Like so many terms in the homosexual lexicon—trick, number—it owes its origin to hooker slang. In the 19th Century, the word was reserved for “fallen women” who could be found in redoubts of lust like “gai Paris.”
(Richard Goldstein)
After the parlor was busted, Randy Raye moved to San Francisco and began film school. The mother of my beloved locked herself in the bathroom and called us, sobbing into the phone. Later, the trial. When we got to San Francisco, we moved into Margo St. James’s place and slept in her bed as Margo was touring the country giving lectures on prostitution. She had a white Manx cat with one blue eye, one green eye and a sleeping bag covered with ripstop nylon which we unzipped and used as a (drafty) blanket. Her apartment building was poured solid concrete, immune to fire. She had more porn magazines than I had ever seen piled under various tables, a professional collection which she picked through while wearing her reading glasses. The magazines interested me for a while, then I ignored them. Better was her poster collection, which had the promotional posters of every Hooker’s Ball ever staged. One poster on red paper showed a woman reclining, tickling her genitals with a feather. A big woman, her thighs already sliding out of the picture, and high in the corner that wavy smile, like a flag’s stripe.
1. Sex Talk
From my table in the cafe I watched her walk up the pavement, with a curious stiff-legged stroll. She was wearing a man’s suit from the ’40s, baggy pants, blue smoke curling from the tip of a thin cigarette. Her round cheek was so soft it reminded me of one of those pictures of Colette in drag.
Among lesbians the story is a form of sex talk—a joint whereby the community and the couple are of the same body. Proximity is difficult but brings us tongue to tongue. “Fetish as disclosure.”
My relation to fetish:
bigger here are importantly hugely infantile
I could feel my body proffering a leather
nipple. waiting to plus anemone
Lean identified rubies loosen
Lévi-Strauss argues tattoos are the sign of a defended tribe. A tribe facing extinction or being threatened. Fetish works in that direction. One might say in a defended world, identification becomes t
he uniform feature.
I ordered espresso with a piece of lemon peel. When she ordered the same thing, I slapped her face lightly, as a joke. She tilted her head, rubbed her chin thoughtfully as her eyes closed and a smile came onto her lips. “That was interesting,” she said, “but you only slapped one side.”
Narrative seeps from the broken privacy of the couple. It is a disturbance of intimacy, a betrayal, which accounts for its dramatic effect…
Yes! The dramatic effect lies in the transgression. A matter of identity equaling control, and then pleasure in the diffusion/breaking of the pattern. A pleasure of violation. Broken expectations.
So, I slapped the other side of her face, with my whole hand instead of my fingers. “You did it differently that time,” she observed, and I watched her soft cheeks flush. “I want to keep you off balance,” I said.
Intimacy fastens like barrettes—
Intimacy fastens, to be inserted somewhere inside the head.
The other is recognized by means of fantasy, so that intimacy itself is a fiction, dreamy as sky writing, a slogan in white cloud…
or perhaps an architecture? An absence underlined. You speak of skywriting… Narration in the twentieth century had been permanently formed by cinema and the photograph. Now… how to dislodge their control?
2. Real Charm
Sit on my face
See how wet I am
unmistakable juice and smell and hair
innocently sweetheart clit scream breath blue
thighs hot swollen fully
Look has abundance
Lying played pulled cooed and fatted
focused
suddenly dry
kiss me
fuck you
returning real charm
IF I WERE ATTIRED TO RECEIVE THIS WITH
ANY ACCURACY—
MY GARMENTS WOULD FALL STRIDENTLY
INTO ME.
Eroticism in the West proceeds through a
strategy of striptease as moral tale.
Fantasy bends it out of shape
twists in my face. not a nice ass
but a great heart-shaped butt
the bottom
what’s written out
an unassimilable
Conventional narration must contain her.
His little death does not detain me. Determinism
holds us all down…
The smiling faces of ads are a form of control through resemblance. A community of female sexual perverts resembles nobody, and nobody wants to resemble us.
What I love in MAYHEM is a notion of backwards. The fact that I could retreat and reorder without feeling sacrificed. The filmic codes are clipped—which has the curious effect of separating the image from its portent of ‘accuracy.’ Recognition torn…
“Go on and suck. Suck the life outta me. I wanna feel my life in somebody else’s mouth.”
Following this line of thought, power verbs shape
faces on
your own prism
cunt the civilization of the ass
unseals
becomes like you when you come and wear
the kind of smile I want to take home.
SURFACING ON THE BED AMID RIOTS
I LOVE TO BE FILLED WITH TIME/
IMPROVISATION
OF YOUR MOUTH BETWEEN MY THIGHS.
3. Story Line
Her hand on my shoulder, that first gesture of invitation, was so characteristic of her. Circular as a huge conscience, something to follow indefinitely. Her fingered goodbyes marked my body, a sort of sexual technique. Even this story, its thin crust, marks her evasions.
INCAPABLE OF BEING USED UP
The progress of tensions through narrative ‘line’ has parallels in the maps we make of our lovers’ bodies and the moments of exposure and vulnerability on the way to orgasm.
IT’S BEYOND SURPLUS
FULL OF HOT and chronic satisfaction
soaked cause I’m stopped between love and a third tongue
girlfriend sexy buttons popping twisted
I’m visually them physically the unreasonableness of the
situation
this world
It is tension more than line that interests me. I see a field—promises—an array of conjugation—the wish you want. Line, if you must, is a focus perpetrating depth. The line as line exists on the surface, is habit perhaps?
The idea that I’m telling a story is what I’m attached to, not the linearity or anything else. I’m attached to this idea because it establishes contact—which can be appropriated, misused, disrupted, eroticized. Like this one:
Terry was a big-boned whore, a lesbian, and an incest-survivor. When she became a fundamentalist Christian, she married a carpenter. Everyone wondered how much did he really know? One day in a rage, he was heard yelling, “Well at least you were never a prostitute!”
Erotic error kissing my impeccable cunt
Order in time (or the ‘linearity’ of narrative) doesn’t necessitate a patriarchal ordering of consciousness. I prefer an implication/integration of loss: what happened in the beginning (or middle or end) won’t return.
Forget repair, even if minimal. If loss is a part of life we are missing nothing.
Then what is pleasured in the telling of a story?
The wind in fact an instrument of excess, prone to gorgeous. Or, sex as disclosure—a manifest and metaphorical stripping.
4. Audience
And what about the relation of recognition to desire? As in this quote:
“To desire the Desire of another is to desire that the value that I am be the value desired by the other: I want her to recognize my value as her value. I want her to recognize me as an autonomous value. In other words, all human, anthropogenic Desire—the Desire that generates Selfconsciousness, the human reality—is finally, a function of the desire for recognition.”
What of the desire for another—not to be loved, but to love? Do I want to recognize me in the lover? Do I want love to recognize me? Do I seek to be lost in love? To be its familiar?
I think that stories have all the sneaky pleasure and mutilations of intimacy hidden within what we call narrative structure. Narrative moments are always coupled and involve multiple manipulations of deceit and recognition.
“When I’m having sex, it’s like I’m having a story. I hear things like ‘She spread her legs as her lover’s tongue softly ran across her vagina.’ The third person! we exclaimed.”
Perhaps what’s operating here is distance—the shadowed sex IS taboo, when its appearance is only in books.
Or could this be, ‘I story myself so others will witness my sex as desire.’ The third person is present only to satisfy my need to be observed…
If the observer is my need to satisfy my desire, this is voyeurism as identification. If the observer is my mind, I have fragmented myself and this is separation as identification. And if I borrow your rules of attraction, I reintegrate opposite sex identification, try on your power.
AGREED: what is functioning is the NOUN of narration, mirroring the sense of self.
I distrust devices of plot and linear time and character relation. I want both process VERB and person NOUN to be tilted. I ask for more ‘takes’ on the body, so that reality is approached in excess of enumeration.
softer bigger whiter breastier
remake the elaborate identity of her
or of her him
elaborate your identity
So it was easy to let her carve it, warble wobble. Only by turning on her with all my teeth bared could I recover ground already lost. Of course I did not. Of course yearning made it impossible. Pleasures of the rupture, rack, and screw.
5. Close Enough
Perhaps what is happening between us is an opening of a kind of erotic conversation. Here, at the margin. Because a community of sexual perverts resembles nobody, and nobody desires to resemble us.
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As a lesbian the differences are multiplied, the possibilities mutate, taking on all kinds of genuinely new procedures. This is not borrowed habit, but a “kind of loving” become, in the presence of wit and intelligence (the head screwed on and on), genuine alternatives
The room is either dark or light or is two rooms. There are implements beyond my consciousness.
Breast high partitions cover the linoleum floor, creating a maze through which workers stroll and softly talk. At either end of the vast warehouse are sealed rooms whose roaring ventilation systems cool the computers. You are allowed in these rooms, because you wear a special identification badge. Between the computer rooms stretch two rows of windows that face twin lines of young olive trees whose leaves are covered with fine greyish hair. Beyond these trees the workers go to sleep and have sex.
Shadows tip the lover onto circumstance.
I want to be touched, or touched continuously.
The sun makes close enough open. Let me drink my bathrobe, skirt a retinue of clings, a sanitized restraint gives way to luster’s substrate
Bent over the edge of the body, there’s no telling who we are. Lattice handiwork, the roseate palm smacking our tin flesh.
We’re getting rosier and rosier.
These large sensations come and go. We want to be a
star, we want to be adorable. Instead the larger
sensations, so open there is a sense of leveling.
What is inside slips out and vanishes.
In any kind of joking, a system that’s given as isolate
