the Infinite Intimate
Written by Kate Howe, edited by Jonathan Miles.
Infinite. Intimate. A delicate mode of dissolution, the impetus of which sends us hurtling into the never-ending expanse of consciousness. It is the warmth of your breath against my ear as you confess; it is the secret I hold back even from myself and think I will never tell. Not impossible, but unlikely. Not a paradox, a new truth: a sequence of polemic doubles disavowing fixed identities and, with this, modes of binary logic.
To drift, an aesthetic of drift, the drift of bodies becoming unanchored and thus fluid, the drift of memory forms, the drift within the emotional life of cells. To perfuse the boundary, to transgress the form, to permeate, perforate and shine through the other.
This is the work of capturing forces and putting them to play amidst the turmoil of figures drawn from memory, lodged, heels out, in the cellular structure of becoming, door bolted shut. There is within this release of forces a sense of resistance to power and control that serve to fix identities and a sense of the fractured and nervously hidden nature of the whole, but yet to be unified, form.
This art object, sensual, lush, dark, lascivious, and pious all at once, is also a teacher. Lodged within material structures are fibers forming and deforming memory circuits. The memory circuits of the body, acrobatic and clever, running under the narrative memory of the mind, sifting and placing in order, making order of the chaos, leaving dangling threads and incomplete sentences and bits of things I meant to tell you off the edge of the void, we do this furiously, the tidying and making sense of and understanding of when actually, memory is bound, and binding and lumpy and unpickable, and physical, an object you can hold in your hand and examine.
I am memory bound by material structures; I’ve been cut apart and sewn together so many times I’m nothing but scar tissue. I’m still strong, tight, and bound, both controlled and cracking open at the same time. Clinging on and fighting for my life on a sea of tranquility, falling through the fold, watching it go by, tick, still here, tock, breathe in, tick, out, tock. Elbows touch.
Body unstuck itself from the concept of gender out there, lost in the space of mortality, eyes bright and open at the prospect of two weeks left. I resaw myself, suddenly, as letting go of looking over my shoulder to see if I was performing Woman correctly - letting go of seeking how to be a woman so I could instead go on to be Person.
Body began to speak to Susanna, coalescing all the Susannas before through the material. This crinkling, glistening, holy and mundane industrial material, tear-resistant, useful still when its beaten, hard to break, easy to repair, performing its purpose over and over and over again. Like a Sysaphis if she was a woman. Now, they rise, beyond Susanna and into the infinite intimate, into the darkest folds where we all think we are hiding.
Last week, I sat, a nude hatchling in a nest of kraft paper, eye to caved-in skull with an enormous remnant of Susanna: gestated in this tiny box, birthed as a giant grotesque Kraft paper moth, my mirror self could not get airborne for all her thrashing. I had my last IV naked as a pupea in that nest of paper, connected to her. Staring at her. I was sitting in meditation in the shop-front window of RuptureXIBIT in an unannounced and impromptu performance for a little over an hour.
I gazed past and through her, me, them, hooked up to this magic pancreatic power wash, as surgical tubing snaked from her mouth to mine, plunged into the vein. I became plump. I became pink. I looked at the mirror of my dying self, of the me I was when I arrived in London: a swollen broken shell of illness beating myself against the cage of my ambition and the howling unfairness of the undiagnosable, continuously misdiagnosed as hysteria, menopause, nerves, migraines, and “women’s troubles.” Prescribed antidepressants, sedatives, nerve-calming agents, and bed rest, my pancreatic cysts were gurgling their unheard and unobserved truth: we are drowning.
I was you once, I said out loud. I know they heard me.
Now, I’m not like you want me to be. Because I have language, I speak in paper tongues, bright within the darkest folds. And I stand layer to layer in the infinite unfolding of all of us: this is the cilia of myself, this memory body constituted outside of my flesh.
