Photo by Jonathan Beckley
There is something calling to me out of the corner of my vision. I’ve been trying to catch it, chasing the blur year after year. I’ve captured a handful of righteous moments, fleeting focus of the thing. Imbalance urges me on, falling forward. Never quite catching up. Trying.
There is a version of me bought into by masses. A mask represented in photographs I never signed a waiver for, the charged feeling of a theatrically lit room as I pass through. Focus and melting. Hot breath, titter of seductive dis-ease… This mask is not a picture of me and my cat at home cuddling, depressed, in a puddle catatonic, working to find the worth of my own mind; fearful I’ve lost it. I appear to the outside world as strong I’ve been told. Resilient. Powerful. Handsome. Magnetic. Honest… and I am, inside, just like you. Yet, it is those particular public moments and the stage which are remembered en masse. The moments I have saved up enough energy for the sentence I have to say, and I ignite in the colors of this mask to be remembered. I upstage myself, become mask for a moment. It is of my heart and making, it is not my everyday.
Gossip seeps into the bones, and I avoid it like the poison which kills healthy weeds. Stirred-up half wishes pinned to a board like bugs, sacrificial spell fodder for someone’s experience of envy, dissonance, disagreement, or discomfort. Standing in full icon there is no third dimension into which one can breathe or be recognized as complex, mistakes wrapped in caring, or bumbling human truth. The comments list for miles, iterating “yes/no” forever. Words cease to mean, broken by the binary language of not listening. It doesn’t change things that one stands up to circumstance and takes responsibility, or holds boundaries. It matters that a mask is damaged by someone with emotions who wants to deface, and masks are visible against the crowd.
Our modern commitment to the hunt.
With more modes of communication at our fingertips than ever before, these should be learning days. The sting of hurt can be tempered, worked, and processed until it cracks away upon cooling. We can become resilience and strong beauty, knowing more than we did yesterday. The responsibility and the privilege of our age is in learning. It could be forgiveness too, complex understanding. Today’s emotions are so easily typed into lynch mob campaigns, and these mobs find no remorse at the end of the day, as no corpse but the one imagined has been left swinging. Except a real mind and body hidden behind binary is skewered still. At home barely breathing. We do not stare at blood in the dirt and wonder about our own veins’ worth, only how to spin a moment of temper in someone else’s direction.
It feels to me as though this “civilization” is looking for a magical cure. We seem sure it’s in the pantry and involves ACV, garlic, mushrooms, and a dash of advice from the talking heads on TV. Maybe it’s in the purse of a stranger, that degree being paid back after so many years, or is it in the books on one’s bedside table, the articles building up in bookmark bars, lunch with superficially supportive friends, workaholism lashed back at in too much willful fun? Is it in the fiery stars spelling out a powerless fate, the number of likes we maintain, or the awards an artist takes? Is it in the silent agreements we fulfill: not talking shit at the table, smiling tersely when an off color joke is made, not ever asking for enough, never giving too easily? This thing we call civilization is anemic and it is anything but civil. Teeth bared, weapons pointed, the temptation to prick is unchecked in most households, schools, police departments, statehouses, or by sanctimonious holy. I can’t make sense of it for the vitriol.
I know what it is like to walk, bare feet on dirt, toes muddied and toughened by minerals in the soil. I know what it is to be scraped up and smell of pine, to hear the chatter of a hundred bugs rise and fall with the passing of clouds, the smell of wind bringing the corners of my country to me. I feel my body degrade year by year into the comfort of a couch, a regular relationship, the ease of a few dollars saved up now and again. To pull myself out of fester isn’t comfortable or easy… so I degrade. Start again.
I know what it is like to sound rolling echoes of an orgasm so loud my lover’s roommate moves away. My body is mine and I have a right to it. Your body is yours and you have rights too. Where we intersect there is passion and fear, anger, inspiration, nerves, opinion, getting by, sorrow, annoyance, compassion, love, and desperation… It is common to rewrite history every day based off the ideals we want to feel, traps we long to escape, emotions we want to pass instead of square off and face. Perspective is ever changing as we grow, yet the breeze from politicians, ad execs, and holy men would have you believe it a fundamental crime to touch your own body with love. What evolution is that?! How can we look at each other with love, reach out to touch tenderly, nourish from the richness of connection human beings opportune, if we cannot feel righteous doing pleasure onto ourselves first?
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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~Thank you.
