18 11 14

It is North Wales. My lover and I are cycling through a town we pretend is unknown to him. We have begun the process of dressing up for a party, the remainder of our costume stashed in our rucksacks, alongside a veritable cabinet of drugs. I have some sort of clear liquid decanted into small [infant’s] medicine bottles; he has a white powder pressed into folded A4 paper, [that I know of].

We find ourselves in a space between alleyways/behind houses that is also a concrete architectural feature/garden for use by the residents [it is also a thoroughfare for pedestrians and cyclists – or perhaps a desire-line]. Lover strikes up a conversation with a manual labourer who is working the concrete land, re. directions, drug-taking etc. There is a mocking quality implicit in the former’s attitude to the latter that bothers me; the labourer seems flummoxed by my lover: he seems gentle and we are not. In the meantime the vicinity has filled up with elderly bodies moving mechanically with fixed expressions that trouble me. They don’t speak; they fix us with their gaze, which is empty, generalised and disturbing in its sameness. I urge my lover to stand beside me, to reinforce me somehow under the hypnosis of the gaze – their curiosity seems disproportionate. As the tension builds I make the decision to rather theatrically introduce myself, to demystify my self, but my utterance is marked with aggression. Haven’t you seen one of these [gesture to self] before? I am Lauren I am thirty-three I am from Preston, Lancashire, haven’t you heard if it? It’s a shitty town like this, it’s 4 hours north from here, on the west coast of England, it’s up there [gesture upwards], have you never left this place?

He has slipped away. He scoops me up mid-soliloquy [eliciting no response from my audience, their muteness escalating my diatribe, if anything]; we descend through the concrete passageways out into the world.

I am in the passenger seat of a car that is driving through treacherous conditions beyond any conceivable blizzard: snow falls, ice slabs are heaped up everywhere like icebergs, multi-layered sheets of ice around and beneath us. There is a woman in the backseat describing details of her sexual history. My lover is driving and talking to me ceaselessly, unperturbed by conditions I view as suicidal. I express this sentiment thus: I wouldn’t drive in this climate, to which he [nonchalantly] replies: one is safest when one is driving oneself [as opposed to ‘being driven’ on public transport, I presume].

I am silently capturing our situation, visually. My eyes remain fixed on the scenery that rushes towards us, eyes telescoping left to right, taking everything in [pre-emptively, like my driving instructor said: over-anticipating]. I notice that at a distance of about 100 feet a slip road to the right that joins this major road, which has 6 lanes crammed with vehicles travelling at speed: mostly juggernauts, articulated lorries etc [they loom large over this small car]. I notice that cars are joining this major road in the opposite direction, and skidding across the carriageway in a vain attempt to avoid multiple collisions, which occur but to which I purposefully turn a blind eye. Dusk light congeals with headlights and our vision is fuzzy, grey-amber. With calculated ease my lover manages the vehicle; he deftly manipulates the controls in order to drift, most casually, to the far left of the road/dividing us from the commotion, which continues ahead, repeatedly, to my horror. Slow down. keep left (cliff edge, M62, road most travelled as a child, a threshold, white rose of Yorkshire embedded in the rock, pass-over, liminality: “imaginary space of parents” into which we are born, place of perpetually angst-ridden return).

5 11 14

We sleep beside each other until he wakes and lights up a cigarette. The scent of tobacco floods a scene which frames him, my younger sister and me. The location is my childhood home. My daughter is asleep nearby. He is smoking and I ask him extinguish the cigarette, or go outside, in response to which he turns to my sister asking: should I go outside? From this gesture, the fluid substitution of authority, or else a substitution of confidence, I can tell he has yielded to her seduction. Before she can answer him I fly into a violent rage, I heave him across the threshold out of the house, maniacally exhorting him to get out in some sort of paroxysm that expresses my crushing sense of being totally undermined. Too close, too close. 

22 9 14

A huddle of three men – one of them, my lover. One of the men exposes a huge tumescent cock, its spherical tip (like the cap of a mushroom) is swollen and crimson. [First response]. Notice the other two men (they may, or may not, share a name) seem unperturbed by this phallic display (and why should they be). I identify the three men: father, lover, daughter’s father [interchangeable gendered bodies]. Continue to lurk in the vicinity of these three men in spite of the fullness of the room [party, drinks, frocks and suits]. The huddle opens and one man (not my lover) is coated in semen that has ejaculated from the bulging tip of that massive penis that earlier disturbed me. Erotic-vibes but from me not towards me. The semen like a wave has crashed over the man: it seems to pour out from his face, colour and texture icing-like as it drips from his chin. I imagine it on me, in me: the taste and the smell [overpowering].

11 11 14

The first witnessing is only of bodies falling, quite abstracted, orange shadows passing across the field of vision, against a concrete backdrop punctuated with small opaque windows that reveal nothing.

In New York City I pace about, every now and again descending into the subway (like those photographs I rediscovered in my memory), riding trains. I have redesigned my hairstyle – my fringe is dyed platinum blond and from the crown to the tips is hot pink, saturation increasing as it reaches the tips. I <3 my hairstyle; I feel renewed and reawakened from a decade of cultural obscurity and decreasing circles of criticality that have effaced my potential. I am sitting on a train, anxiously, on my way to a ‘meeting’ with my father. I am not drugged. I project that he suspects me drugged, for which he blames my lover. I project this in the dream and it floods me with more anxiety. I am sweating profusely. I hold a pocket mirror to my face and glance at my reflection. I reflect [on] my appearance. My appearance is too much; my hairstyle is ridiculous. Something that ought to be youthful and sleek is actually a depressing masquerade which harks back to a time before even my own [youth]. I look like an amalgam of Rod Steward and Suzi Quatro: like a Jem doll from the 1980s who is trapped in the signifiers of 1970s rock, in spite of a sort of futuristic pinkness.

It is now that I begin to nestle into my ridiculousness and begin to ripen there, and as I do my defences drop, the fury that resides in me seeps out into the follicles and I feel emblazoned. Also I realise that I need my daughter with me, and call my own mother with whom she is staying whilst I attempt this (nonetheless abortive) encounter with my father, who gives me nothing and takes everything: who empties me. I dial the number incorrectly over and over again, my palms are sweating and my body is convulsing. I manage to speak to someone [male] who reports that he, my mother and my daughter are driving away from where I am, out of the city, for the afternoon. It is too much to take [that my daughter is diverging from where I am], so I return to the subway, only to find that my train has departed. I watch it snake out of the station, aghast, horrified and paralysed.

Somehow, simultaneously, when I am calling/speaking to my mother/her male companion (and not getting through) I am also engaged in the articulation of a tirade against my father (face to face). This messy entanglement causes my speech to become corrupted and the trajectories of these confrontations (with self and other) to be mutually engulfing. I have no verbal flow, only bile, which flows but is also produced out of retching. My face is contorted and my tears have abandoned their taut, salty pathways on my cheeks.

Return to the falling bodies. This time, excruciatingly, I accompany them in their descent (scopically: I am a disembodied witness). The expressions on the faces of these falling bodies, clad in orange jumpsuits in the manner of U.S. prisoners, are already fixed grimaces etching greyish flesh. As the ground closes in my view detaches by degrees. By the time they make contact with the sidewalk [this in New York City] paving slabs, this witness watches from a distance of 15 feet: close enough to discern the crumpled (bloodless) corpses atop one another in a lifeless pile of grey over grey. The ground is icy and the bodies too turn to ice: the misery of their lifetime of incarceration enshrined in their grimaces that frame gritted teeth. My stomach turns.

30 10 14

I should have never pursued her. Something is happening.

I am living, with my friend and my daughter, next door to where she lives. My friend is (also) in love with you. I go next door (alone). It is early morning. You come to me and we embrace. You offer me breakfast and we talk. You are incredibly warm and tactile. Your hand hovers around my waist. I ask you questions as we move about the house: how long have you been here? How do you make money? (you are smiling and rolling your eyes as you describe the seasonal work you do in Blackpool) How much is your rent? (£300). You live with two women and a man – cardboard cut-outs of the four of you adorn the white wall of the immense vestibule. They seem peripheral, they drift about, and they are monumentally proportioned. You make us drinks and we sit together. Your chair is behind mine and we sit together watching the news on tv whilst sipping hot tea. Your chair is behind mine and the house is peaceful. Your hand is casually draped across the curve of my waist (I must be reclining). We occasionally speak. Our bodies are close. Your hand making contact with the side of my body charges it entirely. I know if I turn to you our faces will be aligned. I know if I turn to you our mouths and tongues will touch and be inflamed. I wake up still charged.

This essay will not engage directly with Emin’s words and the specificity thereof, but rather use her statement as a precipice to jump off.

In the wake of Tracey Emin's recent comments on the position of the maternal and of the artist, I am compelled to explore the status of the so-called artistic impulse in opposition to that of the, again, so-called maternal. This essay will not engage directly with Emin’s words and the specificity thereof, but rather use her statement as a precipice to jump off. For what does becoming a mother bring to or violently steal from the woman, artist or not, in the matrix of too much/not enough which all women must navigate, and furthermore how does the situation of being a mother affect my own personal engagement with the world and consequently my own art practice with which this world is entangled. One has to engage with the myths surrounding the maternal, including the existence of such a state in itself. The maternal figure is highly idealised – and denigrated. It cannot be said that this state is a singular entity and it would be dangerous to make this presumption, which acts as either a barrier to a bodily/emotional experience that runs the gamut between [the] violence [of birth] and unconditional love (that is nevertheless ambivalent), or an escape route (and for my part, I am guilty of predicating my decision to procreate upon the latter). Already one finds oneself in the murky territory of the contradictory and the incoherent. And each condition implies an act of fleeing – from the experience or from a particular idea of oneself.

Emin stated that if she had mothered a child she therefore would have faltered as an artist. Speaking from the post-menopausal position this statement shouldn't have raised hackles: enshrined in the comment is a mere explication of her situation as childless women, which carries its own burden, and a permissiveness that I find quite touching. It’s not as simple as the opposition, something which Derrida would say is appropriative of its other; this formulation of a position reveals in its articulation the passage through one state into another, and the impossibility of this state’s transformation. On the flip-side to which there is a joyful note of liberation from roles that, for her, seem incompatible with the role of the artist; a role and state of being which she has fought tooth-and-nail to occupy. One constantly seeks a narrative that cements one’s position or decision or even assuages one’s immense guilt or heals the wounds one has endured. For those of us who recall previous Emin personae we contrast this statement with that of her perimenopausal incarnation, in which she mourned the loss of her fertility: an acknowledgement, then, of a profound lack, menopause being an intertwined bodily/emotional passage through which all women pass, some enduring and others stoical, and the majority with at least a primordial sense of having 'done one's duty': as if the body and its potential functions were some kind of material to be first manipulated and last, obeyed. Parturition having occurred or not, the passage for all women is the same, and the situation of the both ‘the mother’ and the ‘childless woman’ remains a passage through both biological irruption and relational/libidinal cathection.

Bringing up a 5 year old daughter - in conjunction with her father with whom she stays for roughly a third of the week - definitely complicates the existing complexities of my existence (universally experienced or particular to my situation and the condition of the ‘I’ that occupies it), and presents both restrictions and hidden openings. These openings – some, one has to orchestrate and others attune to, are ruptures that reveal more of the morass of unconscious and experiential raw material that would anyway be fuelling my practice. There are practical exigencies that mustn’t be glossed-over; there are shocking oscillations that propel one hither and thither both physically and psychically with expansive repercussions for other relationships and the embodiments thereof. I don’t believe, as R.D. Laing did, that sociological shifts can heal the wounds of the divided self that goes some way to articulate this state. The maternal is a constant struggle that cannot be pacified by doing away with The Family or redefining the role of he father. Something more rhizomatic is going on that requires a deeper and broader engagement.

Self-identification is problematic as any attempt to fix one’s identity can generate a tumultuous situation for subjectivity (or the ego). The ego (and the unconscious narrative that is always present alongside it) generates itself in opposition to ideal-types from the outside world; necessarily mediated both externally and internally (termed by Freud as projection and introjection). The terms of our identification are defined not from within but from without, so that when one proclaims what one is, be that an artist, a mother, a bookseller, or unemployed, there are frameworks of meaning in place to which one is subscribing. For my part I prefer a multiplicity of partial identifications with a nod to the unknown, that don’t bond me too closely to any yet take all into account. My own tendency is towards the liminal: occupying thresholds, or transitional states, which may equally be called the condition of the artist, or of the mentally ill, or of the maternal, which is a state of constant transitioning and repositioning in relation to the baby/child/adult that itself transitions and reposition in its own right. Transformations operate cross-bodily, simultaneously, echoing and jarring and playing-out over a chain or passage of selves and others. In short: the maternal is a state of relation both like and unlike any other and it unfolds spatio-temporally, produced from a situation of rupturing. One cleaves an identity that is precisely unfixed from a stream that is never conclusively apprehended by the self, for the motion is perpetual, infinite. Self-image producing myths that then set in motion cultural and social presumptions depend not on being (a mire of corporeal/spiritual/consciousness) but on doing and having: the functionality of roles and the body as vessel.

Post-partum, her body of work/sexed body remapped – territoialized, parasitised – Emin might have found herself alienated form it anew: this position of metastasis might have produced some profoundly engaging work, or might have paralysed her with the impossibility of it all and led her instead down the route of least resistance (that is, from without): the contemporary conservative figure of the ‘yummy mummy’, a cultural phenomenon that operates as a narcissistic space in which women can cast-off their prior identity in some sort of consumer-led penitential ritual (“I used to do pills and sleep around but now I do aromatherapy, tend the garden and orbit around the child that is the centre of my universe, so I am therefore forgiven for my flights of youthful fancy, and by the way I AM BETTER NOW”). I can’t help thinking that if Emin had produced from her body another life, and engaged with that process of protrusion, detachment and the complex intimacies and antinomies between mother and child, her work might not have improved or degraded – simply expanded into the territory of an annexe to the realm with which she is familiar: the emotionally violent and the libidinal; the filth and the obscurity and the extrusions of the body in inexorable negotiation with the other.

Being optimistic, as I write, (for this optimism is a fleeting state that is vulnerable to wounding and harrowing visions) about the possibility of flouting ‘lifestyle’ choices, and recognising the illusory nature of such appearances and that, in truth, the maternal is a site of extreme incoherencies and complexities, I am most disappointed by the fear that seems to permeate the subject of the maternal. “You’re life is over when you have kids” is a popular refrain, which actually says more about taxonomies of the domestic/financial that the actual lived experience of caring, in the broadest possible sense, for children. I know practicing artists who have children, men and women, and their attitude, like mine, is co-conspiratorial: the child is along for the ride, that is to say, the child is born into this and it is this (the particular routines, the adventures and the problematics) with which we will all negotiate. Like art, parenting is a process and as a trajectory it is littered with contingencies. The experience is interpenetrating – the maternal body and the mind are altered by the experience, but why fear this? Are we afraid of letting go of ourselves? For holding tight to the mirror/s supports and at the same delimits the frameworks of our identity-forms. Subjectivity, however, is in constant flux, and by destabilising the fallacy of selfhood to which we (narcisstically) cling, our potential for polymorphic intervention, experiences and leaps of faith, in short, our openness, is spread wider.

There are certain considerations I don't want to consider, either way (Read/Perform)

31 7 14

A mud bath, the wash, sea-sand. A sleeping dog is folded inside a small box made of stiff hessian as sludgy seawater flows over its’ body and gradually, over an achingly unfolding period of time, before my very eyes, submerging it entirely: an immersive nap or else a watery grave. Zerry – a woman of uncommon mercy and a kindness that verges on the self-less (a suspect condition of self-bondage) – she rocks the stiff hessian casket/Moses basket back and forth in the shallows, watching as waves lap across the contours of the dog’s body, the water reconstituted as fingers that once stroked it, conscious in their (the fingers, the waves) negotiation of shape, variations in hardness and softness and the commune between flesh, fur and bone. “His time has come,” she utters beneath her steady breath, turning to face me, and I face her with incredulity, entranced, and by way of this entrancement, unstable “in my self.” I feel stupid and dedicated to nothing, no-one through witnessing this ritual of submersion, this gentle articulation of a sleep that exists in the tension between life and death. Shutting-down, as opposed to ending, it is his time to retire and not to expire.

This beach occupies the periphery of the school grounds, to which I have returned to complete my education (as all must do). So many a year of procrastination have kept me from this place and I find myself here again, inevitably, for this return is inescapable, at the age of “nearly 40”. Standing at the school gate, which never was locked or functioned as a border between inside and out – a most permeable membrane – I plead with the Mathematics teacher, a stocky man in a shirt and tie, who I realize is approximately my age. He iterates: “EVERYBODY must complete their education”, which I know to be true, and this minor horror thus magnified by necessity and gravitational return must be relived.

I make my unsteady way through familiar corridors, they are etched onto my deep memory like tattoos: burned there indelibly, but the rawness and soreness reducing as years pass. The deep memory – encrusted with scabs. I make my way with extreme caution – one never knows who one may encounter on these unyielding passageways lined with doors like mouths that store bodies until a separate wave of hunger passes over, parting the lips to expel and to ingest: a continuum of consumption and regurgitation. One never knows whom one may encounter on spiral staircases with their blind-spots and the hierarchisation of bodies by virtue of their position on the staircase; with their multiple, invisible entry points. I proceed from the ground upwards. I reach the halfway-point of the spiral, imbibing through mouth nose and pores the sickly stench of cleaning fluid, this aroma seeming to congeal in my throat, a sticky mass, producing a gag reflex that is in spite of itself rather pleasant – body and environment synchronised in the arena of the repellent. I consider the appeal of an artificial floral display whose perfection draws one into collusion with ones own deception: a vision of self-deception. I detect the scent of toast through the fug and make my way (I had paused) down the staircase to the ground floor (again), glimpsing the image of Deanna through the exterior motion of my descent (the interior and exterior steadiness has reversed). I detect the tight blonde curls, the concave thighs and the complexion deliberately masked with a velveteen patina of liberally daubed foundation and compressed powder that fully suffocates the skin; a mask of flawlessness behind which she (afraid, aggrieved, bereft) dissimulates. I detect this girl, and the very awareness of her presence in the scene, magnifying for my perception the power of the CASUAL GESTURE coagulates into an erupting pustule of impotent rage that remains imprisoned, for to manifest this as an eruption that is detectable by her would only close the gestural circle, and render my imprisonment external, or in the real. To echo the casual gesture, to correlate myself, to remake myself in this constellation would unlock lesser-mediated emotional boundaries. Opposition thus reconstructed as alignment, I swallow the key. I did it then as I do it now, “almost 40,” I swallow myself and in doing so reinforce the organic conglomeration cell.

30 7 14

Moving alongside a river, apparently still, the current imperceptible to the naked eye. Abstracted ‘moving’ as opposed to ‘being moved’ via a specific mode of transportation, as if being carried along, or else set in motion through artificial means that are supplemental to the body. Prosthetics – perhaps cyclical – though detached from vehicular frame, render my body as vehicle, its propulsion synthesized from without. The dream state of flowing: the scene and the subject interpenetrating over and under – entire body and entire scene undulating in mutual encapsulation: in ‘infinite reflexivity.’

Still passing by, I am compelled by the view to focus my attention upon the opposing bank and a dense conglomeration of fir trees, many of the firs heavily loaded with snow. Illuminated magnificently by the low early evening sun that reflects onto them in dissipating amber orbs, the vision manufactures a wrench in my guts that twists deeply: both engorging and excavating, producing melancholia that bleeds through me like an embrace.

Where are we now and what place are we going to? Up ahead is the small fishing village that my dreams have shown me for months; the place with the fish restaurant in which I wait tables and my father cooks. A rustic, affable people populate the village and I am welcomed as opposed to held there in perpetual tension (the mark of other ‘homes’ I have attempted to ‘construct’). Holding my entrails in my two cupped hands, coagulating blood and incomprehensibly vital pieces of me escape through the gaps in my fingers that can never close around this conception of self adequately. Loss marks every attempt at apprehension.

Snow now falls; the last time I encountered you (home) was in Spring. I move, again, with a sense of disarticulation, ever closer to the center of the village and pass by a huddle of shirtless men with smooth tanned abdomens, full-figured with limbs like sausages (interior-meat chaffing against the translucent case in which it strains), and stiffly rounded bellies that demonstrate their comforts. It’s snowing and the last time I was here – it was Spring – they were there, too, enjoying a break from manual labour; they are mimetic totems of the world outside and the temporal rupture of the unconscious. ‘Life’, synthesized by my unconscious, has continued without ‘me’, and yet ‘I’ am always ‘here’, this I ‘feel’ wherever my momentary state of consciousness manifests itself on the spectrum.

Katie (a friend from school-days) disturbs me at my temporary abode (a rented room?) at the precise moment of clarity that precedes a shift into the auto-erotic. This programme of disintegration has a tool: a mains-powered phallus whose ergonomic shape belies my desire and my method. The meaning of the penetrating object is thus stripped away in the gestural mimicry of a living body, reconfigured as gestural excess. Penetration is far from the objective, for fucking myself is a fully disempowered activity, serving by its disembodied imitation of copulation only to accentuate absence. The possibility of self-penetration occupies a distant point on the trajectory of sexual desire. Too distant to reach, its performance exposes a detour, a denouement – engagement reconstituted as premature unraveling. Instead of penetration I yearn for apprehension – fleeting yet stabilizing touch, touch that configures the body as embodied matter, an interrogation of inner-space, a pressure that acts like an anchor. The clarity foregrounds an application of pressure that moves and yet doesn’t diminish its hold, so that the movement abandons the touched body in a state of bondage by invisible ties. Pushing against the opening of the body with its knots of clitoral nerve-endings, rather than passing into it and the miasma of lubricating mucosity secreted there, I maintain an urgent bilateral tension between inside and out.

There are bedsheets suspended from the ceiling, bisecting the domestic scene of my masturbatory hovel. So it is from this state that I am transported to the previously described theatres of melancholic return induced by incandescence and a sense of belonging induced by the scene of an unreachable anchoring. I think: if fucking serves to consolidate the multiple threads of ones emotional and physical pull towards the other, notwithstanding the multiple (emotional) withdrawals and (physical) disappearances, does auto-erotic sexuality function, reflectively, to reintegrate multiple performances and obfuscatory gestures that constitute the generative ‘self’?

14 6 14

“LAUREN, LOOK AT IT!”

An electric storm illuminates the black sky in incandescent bursts, seeming to bruise it, tracing purple smudges in its wake. The lightning tears gashes into the night, producing within me magical fascination at first, which by fractions transforms into apocalyptic dread. The boundary between these states is in tatters: fascination and dread exist in eternal collaboration, hovering around entry points into my body, which is paralysed and my eyes are flooded.

On a train hurtling across a bridge that intersects a chasm below, towards a city that doesn’t exist, vulnerability is ramped up. The tin cage in which my body is held articulates the exposure to risk by virtue of ITS vulnerability. A machine magnetized by the multiple sources of stimulation, inside and out. Electricity seeking a passageway to multiply itself, a channel in which it’s current, like blood coursing through a pulmonary system, links up with and absorbs into its other/itself. The train clatters over the bridge, its motion echoed and amplified within the carriage by the acoustic possibilities of the limited space in which the sound careers chaotically, reverberating violently, this violence demonstrated by the escalating cacophony. Still traversing the narrow bridge, the train swerves to the left and the city that doesn’t exist shifts into view. Then lightning strikes the train and the train stops. This seizure is unceremonious. “IS THAT IT?” We must disembark. Find shelter for the night.

The security system is elaborate; a cassette deck constitutes the locking mechanism. The ‘correct’ cassette must be inserted. I select Julian Bradley music (to which R utters, “oh, Julian…” I resist the urge to pass comment, lapsing into a state of pure utility). The magnetic tape is torn and I know what to do – muscle memory articulates my hands and fingers – I place selotape across the exposed tape and plastic receptacle inside which the tapes’ axes are encased, thereby encasing, again, the entire unit. This is the secret: tape up everything. Reject the possibility of reconstruction. I live next-door with Luke Younger, I say: “You know that, right?” Everyone passive and distant as if emptied out: slumped. I have revealed myself to be, beneath it all, a real stranger.

9 12 13

My lover, my sister and I have arrived at the venue hours too early for the show. It’s 4 o’clock; mid-Summer hazy sunshine produces a glowing that gestures towards lightness-of-being, but not for me – I am anxious and angry.

Attempting to communicate with my mother, who is interchangeable with Sarah: my friend. Both should be here I am in possession of tickets, frantic, I cannot relax in spite of being present prematurely. There are crowds of people, and dogs, everywhere. The venue is a valley/is a park (Potternewton Park). Human bodies lie down in the grass, basking in the sun, enjoying the company of other humans. David is dancing inside with a beer in his hand. His face is filthy and his movements are jerky, which alarms me; I pass him, ignoring his attempts to grasp me.

My sister sits at the bar smoking, always smoking. “You are always smoking” I say. Her lips are painted red. David is sitting at the bar. He is upright though dressed casually, with an expression of confident geniality. He is desirable. My sister is dancing. In a swift movement she swooshes up to David and launches her body onto his. He is seated on a short stool with his back against the bar – legs open, feet fixed to the stool, rendering thighs rigid. My sister lands perpendicular to him – her open legs scissoring his lower abdomen – their pelvises are locked together (her legs remaining outstretched at either side of his torso). Their hands are fixed at their respective sides. I approach them as she springs away from him (all of these details occurring in an elegantly prolonged moment). Their coupling strikes me as neither one of whimsy nor concupiscence.

I direct a rage at them that had, up to this point, remained buried within me. I spit bile-fuelled diatribes at each of them in turn. All attendant fall silent and cease to move. Everything is still and my mouth is moving. We three leave for the sun-dappled exterior where so many dogs roam; I am terrified, I am thinking of my baby daughter. We have walked away and begin to hike up a narrow trail on a hillside that looms over the city (Hebden Bridge – where ‘the view’ is).  There is an impenetrable tension between us and everything. My face is contorted – the lines around my mouth and nose growing deeper, ageing me; I am suddenly aware of being alone in my body; my body as an army, a membrane repelling psychic interlocutors from all directions (including within).

On the trail two black dogs rush by; as they pass they rustle the dry grass that has been baked by the sun. My sister is ahead of me and I witness her body folding into the soil as a dog sinks its teeth into her arm. I see blood on the arm and on the muzzle of the dog, which has turned white. From this point on we are allies. The dog owner – an apparently mild-mannered and apologetic woman - begins to walk with us. She speaks of her husband and her babies (they are down below beside the venue with the contented masses who lay there in the grass with their lovers and children, static instead of trudging merciless along, as we do). We seem to represent a nihilism that produces propulsion: Keep Walking! We Must!

Still too early for the E.S.G. show. I have a red union jack letter-headed sheet of paper on which I write a note for Sarah, something ambivalent, which I heard someone else say: “Come if you like”. I write it neatly over the horizontal section of the St. George’s Cross.

2 12 13

At the home of Felicity (my daughter’s friend from school), which is cluttered and teeming with ‘things’ – antiques and objects with animal faces that I remember from my own childhood – a duck, in particular: rusting. Everything is very close. Felicity’s mother and father loom large wherever I look – she: furtive; he: hardly bothering to mask his desire (towards/for me). Inside, it smells of roasting meat and outside there is a festive buzz of mainly hushed chatter with occasional bursts of promiscuous laughter. My daughter and their daughter are playing happily together whilst her father (his bulging face and body always so close to mine) is attempting to offload mirrored picture frames onto me. They are like boxes but without glass. He seems to manifest the curious narcissism of a ‘hoarder’ like me, which I tell him and he enjoys; we are thus bound together by our shared obsession.

Dog-attack? No, misunderstanding-elicited-by-over-zealous-dog-owner. My daughter climbs into the grey buggy that currently rots in our cellar, lays back and immediately falls asleep. I am stuffing my things into the buggies’ undercarriage basket. Boxes and the like: parcels and packets - objects that fit together. Then the mirror frames, which I slide satisfyingly atop the small heap of unsteadily stacked oblongs.

The district has morphed into a market town, and the wheels of the buggy into those of a car, which is being driven hesitantly by Felicity’s mother; she is hunched over the wheel and I am beside her, the husband/father character hovering between us. He disgust me but I realise I am starting to appreciate his object-status – his use-value in a potential forthcoming exchange.

My daughter is playing on the street outside our home. I plan to wait for her father/my lover to call/materialise. Asa is standing in the doorway to my kitchen where the bead curtain hangs (it is currently tied to one side by the waist-tie of my apron), and I approach him, and we embrace. We embrace deeply, as if he is a healer or as if the chemical reaction produced by our bodies pressed together releases a transcendent elixir. All distractions dissipate. For a moment it is bliss – he is tall and broad-shouldered and his embrace envelops me totally, until ‘I’ ‘disappear’. I detect the quickening of his breath and come to realise that the embrace is arousing him, which in itself, the thought of it, arouses me. We move into the kitchen, standing by the sink; the kitchen table and chairs are to our left and the window is directly behind us. I unzip his jeans and remove his erect cock, which is gigantic. He pulls my dress up and pushes it against my opening and I am afraid he might injure me, in spite of having given birth, a point that seems to have receded into my unconscious, so that fear corresponds instead with the loss of my virginity (like in ‘A ma Soeur’ – “just one hard thrust is the best way, trust me”).

I pull myself away before he penetrates me and flee to the space behind the bead curtain (now untied) and watch from this position of partial obfuscation as he uses two hands to lift his obscenely tumescent cock over the sink. He ejaculates a stream of greyish semen that spurts of out him in propulsive bursts in tandem with the squally waves of his orgasm. Peace follows: then shame/guilt.

6 1 14

I discover that my mother has been plying my nephew with alcohol to make him sleep, which elicits a confrontation that escalates until she grabs a handful of blunt cutlery from the kitchen drawer and begins stabbing me with it. I dodge the jabs and flee to my bedroom intending to leave home (all the time thinking: why am I even here?) I see Hilary outside the white house (Rebecca’s house) at the heel of the cul-de-sac and she wanders over to me. I ask breathlessly if I can stay with her – she agrees – and she walks away.

Upstairs. Wandering through a market-place that features at its centre an art installation recreating the hotel room in which two artists lived in the early 20th Century – a cluttered dressing table, decaying clothing scattered over antique furniture, the pair of them sculpted out of wax, strewn across the bed in the throes of orgasm, or death; forever embodied in a state of rapture. I am overflowing with vicarious pleasure. I cross the ‘room’, a film-set of sorts, out of it and into the bustling market (Kirkgate, Leeds) where a matted-haired woman complains loudly on the subject of Christmas trading. ‘We didn’t leave ‘til 6 on Xmas Eve, and then had only two days off’, so today must be December 27.

An orgy is taking place upstairs in the eaves of the house (familiar to me from an earlier dream in which I inhabited a mansion, widows and staircases multiple and often parallel. I am naked between bodies mostly female like mine. My sister is talking to me as I press myself against these bodies, always close to orgasm but never coming. A body climbs onto my body, I hold the buttocks in my hands, kneading and pulling them absent-mindedly, a voice uttering from the mouth of the body, and my sister asks what I am doing. I cannot answer. Instead I ask: ‘do you know that mum is giving alcohol to Jack every night?’ and she affirms. ‘It helps him sleep’, she says, giving rise to infuriation. ‘The child is an alcoholic,’ I accuse, ‘and it is down to you all’.

Lacerations

When I close my eyes I can see
blood. Whenever I used the word ‘laceration’
I didn’t mean this.
I am not looking there, not there.
I am steeped, drowning in blood.


And when I wake,
drag myself up from the place I sank and rose
to be greeted by death
and then, mistaken (death was thwarted),
after drifting around an alcoholic nightmare,
I make contact.


A trauma. A lesion. An itch from which
I remove my hand, calmly. It is placid, this place,
it is still.
I have collapsed (his hand is on my socked foot).
I am contained; I am held.


I say: I should go.
I don’t go. My need
is becoming clear. It is revealed.
It is revealed to both.  My need is revealed
to both of us; to me, to him – at this moment.
I am together with someone.
I am clothed.


I ask to be close, and I am rewarded
with closeness. Libidinous thrills – these are absent.
I wouldn’t have asked for that if I could.
I am filled up, overflowing, with orgasmic
waste. Excess. A fountain, a labyrinth, a thousand
(little) deaths.


I am
enamoured, admiring, humbled.
I have sunk my face into a stranger’s breast.
I have lost my inhibitions there.
I am present, living, focusing
on the hands that
move, with care,
in the space between the falling shoulder of my blouse
and the taught strap of my vest. That very
slice of flesh.


I relive this sensation. This gentlest of touches.
This being touched. I watch the hand I called
‘strangely elegant’, both in motion and stasis,
upon my hip. Casual, yet incisive.
Not loose, not promiscuous, but
doing, making (me).


Yes, there are eyes that see me and,
in turn, I see. There is the sludge of magnetism.
But I am no empty vessel.
I am no hole to be filled.
I needed strength and it came forth from
this unlikely, yet potential source, and
there is no reimbursement,
no expectation. This ‘man’
is making me into a ‘woman’.


I don’t need to drink from his cup.
I don’t struggle underneath his
frustrated desire
to possess, bodily or otherwise a ghost that
slips by unawares, out  the door, and is
miles away. There is no struggle.
I have retreated from that.
This economy is as far-removed as I can imagine
from that.


And my centre shifts from nerve-endings
to the womb. Away from goal-oriented psycho-sexual games
to kindness and ‘free exchange of strengths
and weaknesses’. I know about this. I have
imagined it, in-between
violent sex: bodily harm that I still refuse
to name as such.
I know it exists. They speak often enough of it.
I watched it play out on my screen
This morning. A different kind of blood.
A witnessing. Intimacy
unbound.


This  route
is the way
out

of


horror.

Leaning across a table/ travelling over water [the Hudson River].

I watch him chainsaw wood,
he watches me chop wood with an axe.

Wanting to held, but more than that:
to be contained. In the
generous, radiant warmth
of arms that exceed my own,
less flimsy
less fine. Solid.

I,
defiantly  containing myself
drip-dripping, in his direction,
words that mask the true intent,
(to have your arms around me).

But awareness descends
obstructing any possibility of the spontaneous
play of needs being voiced (unvoiced: known)
and met. [That was wordless
passed from me to you by osmosis,
it seems, and without desire’s flames
licking my spine.]

From experience I know,
that to receive is to take (with
some force): to obtain is to remove, and to
seize is to ruin.

He is kind. I know him;
and his hands – oblong, stained,
yet elegantly proportioned – nails cut short,
rather pale. Genuine. I
touch
them
with
mine.
And he doesn’t know
he is touching me.

18 3 14

Claire has obtained for me a gun (from Manchester gangsters she knows). Ash she hands it to me she warns that it ‘goes off easily’ and to be careful. It is wrapped in an off-white napkin. 

Amalgam of Eoin and David. He/they and I are wandering through sparse woodland with the intention of using the gun. The scene is almost joyous; we are not-quite laughing as we sort of frolic in-between trees and kick-about on the dusty ground. He is brandishing the gun and the forest seems to be empty (it isn’t clear if our intention is to shoot a particular person or thing) and the gun goes off. After a few seconds I hear the dreadful sound of an unseen body dropping heavily to the ground accompanied by an anguished cry. We run from the scene for as long as there are no people, stopping and strolling arm-in-arm like lovers when people are there, assuming that a loving couple are above reproach. Police cars arrive, police officers spill out of them: eyeing us with generalised suspicion and passing us by. We seem to have got away with it, but, realising that our days are numbered we separate: me to the coast and he inland. 

She finds me wandering by the sea. It is the North Yorkshire coast, easily identifiable by the close proximity of desolate moorland. I trip through a strip of woodland that runs parallel with the water to her house, into which she invites me to stay with her large family, in spite of the fact that I was complicit in the shooting that injured her. I suspect she knows it was I, and yet she shows concern for me and my daughter, who is absent. I must find her and rearrange my existence. We discuss my movements; she gives me a key. I am suspicious of her kindness but know that I have limited choices.

My plan is to go and see my daughter and Claire at our home, though I know this is very dangerous. I say I will return late (there are inner and outer doors: I am to leave the outer one unlocked and lock only the inner door. Her eldest son, who would return later than me will then ensure the outer door I locked when he arrives). It is finally decided that I will instead return in the morning. I begin to pack my things, anxiously seeking a plastic bag into which to stuff my red Afghan jacket that identifies me and an accomplice of the shooter. I am thinking: I could sell it; I need money and may get £40. I am thinking: I should burn it; it exposes me and I should be inconspicuous. Then my mind turns to disguises. I think: I must cut my hair off. But my face is he same; I should slash it with a knife. 

COLLAGE

collab w/ Karen Constance

BOXED UP BOXED IN

Poetry collab w/ Valerie Webber

21 3 14

4 4 14

Dreams (archive #1)

Double-yolked

Performance at Green Door Store, Brighton, Nov 2012

Snapshots of Leeds and Anglesey