Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  It is difficult to recall what that total, exhaustive feeling of not knowing feels like now, but it is the feeling I had both in watching the collapse of the hotel and in first wrapping my hand around someone else’s cock. Here in summer, slightly stoned in the afternoon and with Jackson beside me, hustled again out of a porn store, his butt and tits a pleasurable distraction, I can convince myself I have learned something about sex over the past twenty years of hooking up with however many hundreds of people. I know, for instance, how to massage with my tongue the muscles of an anus so that it opens itself further, but I still know nothing of why sex, or music, or sunlight hold their pleasures. At its best, in fact, sex seems to be only a movement that draws me close to the intimacy of not knowing: whether I’ll slide my cock into Jackson’s pussy or his ass, until we find ourselves there, backs arched and fingers tweaking.

  I agree with Emmanuelle that the best way to know about sex is to have it. One evening, I go to see the theorist Allucquére Rosanne Stone perform at a conference, where I’m also presenting with my friend Ben on a collaborative project in which we find user reviews of erection drugs online and post them on Twitter as TheCialisReview. It’s an exploration of masculinity, wounds, and the digital. The men say things like, “When I do orgasm, I shoot piss all over the place” and “Failed to ejaculate prematurely” and “I developed a small red patch on the tip of my tongue.” These men are so disoriented, as unable to connect with their own experiences as they are lost to themselves in the weird new rules of digital privacy and disclosure. In her performance, Stone tells a long story in which she implants electrodes in a cat’s brain and listens to what it experiences as the cat runs through a field, mice in the distance, becoming “more cat” in the process. At its end, she explains that she has remapped the sensuality of her body, placing her clitoris in her palm, and that she gets off on noise. As a warehouse filled with a hundred or so people applauds and cheers, raucous, she then rubs her hands and shakes with an orgasm.

  When I say I agree with Emmanuelle that the best way to teach someone about sex is to have it, however, I am speaking from 1995. The summer my house got Cinemax was around the same time I entered puberty. We didn’t get access to the internet for several more years, and even then, the available technology meant I could access only written erotica and the occasional photograph. As the town was so small and everyone straight, I had a very slim amount of adolescent sexual knowledge. Searching on Yahoo! after those moments of brief touch that I called sex, I would still not even know what I was looking for, just that I was driven again and again to type in phrases like bras off—not exactly pornographic, and vaguely autobiographical.

  I think of Emmanuelle like a twin to Amanda Lepore. Appearing through the television, they were each more than the gay men of early Real World episodes, more than the lesbian guest stars on Living Single or Murphy Brown. My young self knew that none of the men or women on television was me, even as I formed a fractured identification with them—an identification that allowed me to voice a part of myself while negating something more. But still, in the middle of that negation, I saw Emmanuelle. Her body was multiple, exiled from the explicit and made brilliant in the imaginative, both cock and pussy and neither in my mind. And there, in the illogic of orgasm, my body became multiple too.

  I don’t know what it means to name myself when young, or to search from my mother’s living room for bodies in neighboring towns with a tap, tap. But I do know what it means to be unfixed from narrative, an unfixing that feels something like claiming power. I feel grateful for it, really. It meant that I traveled through space as a hotel burned.

  My summer in New York City continues to pass the way all my summers in New York City tend to pass, with a pace of hurry, rejoice, and resist. This is off to the bar early, a walk where I sweat and shouldn’t have bothered with makeup, people hollering at me, the louder and then less loud hum of the air-conditioning in the window directly behind my bed, not knowing whether I will wait for the bus or walk some, and coming inside from Avory’s roof for a Coors. There is fake grass on the roof and I take a picture of Jackson and a friend, then show it to that friend the next day on the gay beach, where I’m naked and then tired and then on a bus. Everything I do is a weird pocket of experience, balanced with other weird pockets, hours spent furiously writing bland text for my freelance gig, the money I saved already gone to tallboys and, when I am too drunk, a taxi. The summer loops back around itself when Jackson and I send a group text to twenty or thirty friends, a picture of us with emoji pills all over it and “Guess who has chlamydia?” written in bubbly letters. In a run-down building with gay trash everywhere and a performance space, I come late and smoke inside on a dyke night, complaining about the lack of dykes, as do all the other not-dykes there, and when I leave it is sunrise. The summer doesn’t pass any differently when Jackson returns to Australia, after his last morning when we get matching tattoos that say, NO BAD, with a smiley face in the O, which Jackson pokes into my arm in the hurried moments before the airport.

  People sometimes think there’s sadness to my romances because I prioritize long-distance relationships and relationships with people who are already in love with someone else. As Jackson not only lives in Australia but also has there an Australian girlfriend, he’s really ideal for me, both open to the love I offered to the many-handed hunger of transsexuality and also physically unavailable for at least eight months. Long-distance is maybe misleading because it’s not distance (linear) so much as space (four-dimensional) that matters. When my ex-girlfriend or Simon or my ex-boyfriend played the game of exchanging visits with me, it was not as though there were a long line between, connecting us through distance, but rather we were the two endpoints of a hypotenuse and about us spun a sphere through which we could exalt and retreat. So I am certainly sad that Jackson left, and his return the next summer, after I have moved to Chicago and started teaching college, seems far away, but space isn’t really a problem for me, just a comfort.

  “Untitled” (Orpheus, Twice) is two mirrors, side by side.

  They are full-length, beginning at the floor and extending as

  tall as a tall person might stand, a slight space between them.

  You can position yourself to be reflected in one mirror, the

  other, or almost both,

  your full body or a severed portion of it.

  You can also turn away, unseen in either, but still there.

  A certain type of full-length mirror is called a psyche.

  These were old mirrors, adjustable by screws,

  two pillars suspending glass that could be tilted to the flattering

  angle, a system of pulleys to change the height.

  To paint a mirror, people often use silver.

  This is because in life a mirror is silver, even when it reflects

  nothing but a strong crimson, or blue—

  if you stand in a white room and face a mirror, you look back

  in silver.

  Like how a smear of nickel has no facial features,

  the word psyche has a sustained hiss to its meaning.

  It is when life is blown into you and so you breathe,

  but also it is all the things of imagination and materiality that

  make us, the seamless union of our consciousness and our

  unconscious, into an I.

  It is the universe encountered through the personal, a word so

  sibilant you can forget you heard it.

  Over time, people began to hang their mirrors on their cabinet

  doors, and no longer needed the cheval glass.

  In the spare imaginary of Gonzalez-Torres, there are often pairs.

  Nearly as often, he suggests that we think of these pairs as lovers.

  They are “Perfect Lovers,” “Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein,”

  “Lover Boys,” or, “Orpheus, Twice.”

  Or two clocks side by side, two cords each ending in a light

  bulb
, two chairs in front of a little television.

  The twinned mirrors give us first this expectation, that we will

  see the lover twice,

  and then the reality, an image of the self.

  Two, to show us the point where the distinction between lover

  and beloved gives way to me.

  In an art practice that returns to loss and joy, this coupling of

  Orpheus and Orpheus seems keenly both.

  I practice at home, stand in front of a mirror, shifting my weight

  to become full, or half.

  The gray luster feels mythological, beautifully so,

  but the best-known moment in the life of Orpheus has nothing

  to do with his song.

  It’s just a man deciding he would rather see his beloved than

  any future the gods could promise.

  I am looking at my face and seeing the specific shape of my

  cheeks when I smile.

  I am turning to a mirror not for pain, obsessive plucking and

  pain, but to pat those cheeks.

  I am trimming my bangs and humming, as the morning passes.

  I feel warm, thinking of my old self, who was so pretty and at

  times so strong,

  just as beautiful as I.

  How sad, though, when beauty inspires the wrong want,

  when we respond to what extends beyond us with violence.

  In the stories of antiquity, the goddess of love, Venus, grows

  one day intolerant of the woman Psyche, a human so beautiful

  that mortal language could not describe her.

  Venus sends her son, Cupid, to curse Psyche, but as he turns

  invisible and gazes on her sleeping form, Psyche opens her

  eyes and gazes back, staring at the empty space where he is.

  Cupid, shook, sticks his side with his arrow, falls immediately

  in love, and flees.

  When Psyche cannot find a husband (too pretty, too cursed),

  her father visits an oracle, who prophecies that she will marry

  a horrible serpent that flies through the night.

  On divine instruction, the family takes her to a cliff in a march

  that is both funeral and wedding.

  Swiftly, however, a wind lifts Psyche and brings her to a

  beautiful palace.

  There, shrouded in evening, Cupid’s voice speaks, telling her

  that this will be her new home, he her true love, yet ordering

  that she must never see his face.

  At night, he comes to her, this stranger, this captor, who believes

  he is in love.

  She lives like this for weeks, feasts appearing before her and

  invisible choirs singing,

  sometimes in despair, and sometimes in joy.

  The voice of her husband declares that she is pregnant, and

  that if she obeys him well, her child will be a god.

  Endurance, however, can last only so long,

  and when Psyche’s sisters convince her that her husband is a

  monstrous serpent,

  she goes to Cupid in his sleep, ready to stab her way to freedom.

  On seeing his form—

  so gorgeous—

  she pauses, lifts one of his arrows in contemplation, and, accidentally

  stabbing herself with trembling hands, falls also in love.

  Cupid wakes to see her there with a knife.

  He flies away, and the castle disappears, and Psyche, now “in

  love with Love,” feels a profound loneliness land upon her.

  A woman betrayed again, she throws herself first into a river,

  and then, desperate, on the mercy of Venus.

  I fell in love many times.

  I used to be rapturous with it.

  I felt it was an endless potential within me,

  and that every time I fell in love with someone new, I would

  be made new, too.

  This is something like revenge, to fall again in love, after

  someone has taken so much from me, touched painfully the

  way I experience touch.

  After the kind of violence that made me think, no, perhaps

  love like that is not for me, that this is not a thing to which I

  should be open—

  to then fall in love, so happily.

  Sometimes it feels like it just happens, a moment out of

  nowhere.

  Like I see a guy with his curly blond hair and that quick grin,

  and I know that he will be someone to me, and then a moment

  later he looks, and walks my way, and we go from there.

  That feeling, that deep joy of possibility, it seems to come just

  like that.

  And what to do with that desire?

  The best version of me isn’t the person who falls in love, but

  the person who takes love squarely for what it is,

  as an occasion to know someone else, to learn about their

  desires, to be each a better self together,

  so long as that is what we both want.

  To hell with all that hurt, whatever came before.

  We can have a love where we are both happy, in which we see

  ourselves for who we are—

  standing there, where any story might begin.

  So many cults of Venus, so many epithets, it is hard to say

  which version of the goddess decided the fate of Psyche.

  Venus sends her to fetch poisonous black water, the golden wool

  of vicious sheep, a labor of penance.

  Psyche goes to hell, even, in her attempt to please the goddess,

  to gain permission to love.

  Psyche’s quest ends when, at last, Cupid declares his devotion

  to her, and Jupiter grants the two permission to marry, so long

  as Cupid promises to fire his arrows at any disinterested women

  Jupiter desires.

  At the celebration, Psyche drinks ambrosia and becomes a goddess

  in her own right.

  She will live forever now, in love with a god who hurt her and

  who has promised to harm others in the name of love.

  Like Orpheus, Psyche’s life changes when she looks upon a face—

  Orpheus seeing his beloved for the final time, and Psyche

  seeing Cupid for the first.

  What would they each have seen?

  They would have seen a god and mortal, a man and woman,

  ravished by the failure of love, the violent misuse of desire.

  Yet it is Psyche who resolves to walk through hell and who

  throws her body to the rage of a river when Cupid leaves.

  Why should her story be failure or triumph, vengeance or

  sorrow?

  She is a woman who refuses to relent, and she will come to

  name her child Pleasure.

  “Once we believe that there is no God, that there is no afterlife,

  then life becomes a very positive statement.

  It becomes a very political position because, then, we have no

  choice but to work harder to make this place the best place ever.

  There is only one chance, and this is it.

  If you fuck it up this time, you’ve fucked up forever and ever,”

  Gonzalez-Torres said.

  When I first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, I remember

  responding with disbelief.

  How could someone forget such a simple instruction, how

  could he glance?

  But now that impulse seems the only possible one to me, to

  look over your shoulder to see if the one you love made it out

  of hell.

  How could a person resist such a thing?

  And when you have been in hell together, joined the person

  you love at the place of sorrow, the vomi
t and wind, where

  men’s hands reach and grab,

  I know this urge becomes stronger yet.

  Some ancients, however, did not trust this story.

  They wrote their narratives in judgment of Orpheus, a man

  who lived while his lover died.

  They even question the moment itself, rewrite it so that Eurydice

  is no more than an apparition sent by the gods, mocking him

  and his beautiful voice as they ascend toward the earth,

  knowing he will turn.

  There is a point, after all, between apparition and body,

  between first and last glance, somewhere on the horrible edge

  between death’s finality and forever and ever.

  There is a point where a mirror looks back.

  So many stories, taking flight from crags and sinking into

  the floorboards, broken and held in the box of the language

  I’ve learned.

  Yet standing in front of a mirror is such a regular thing.

  It is a domestic moment, repeated several times throughout

  the day, a reminder that this is me, for better or worse.

  I take pills to soften me, I paint myself with a bleached purple

  here and there, I inhale smoke into my hollows.

  And it remains unpleasant, sometimes, to see this beautiful

  person, who knows so well more violence is coming,

  that it’s right out the door.

  In a practice that suggests bodies spilled and gestured toward,

  “Untitled” (Orpheus, Twice) also seems to me one of the most

  embodied works.

  Maybe that crude fact, that it is my own self filling that mirror,

  makes it so.

  I want to state this again and again, to prove it to myself, the

  fact of being alone.

  Even when penetrated by or entering another body, wound

  together like sheets, or torn,

  glance into the past and future and the body is alone again.