[excerpts from Last Beauty of the Earth, a work in progress]
..One can be almost certain that the inflationary horniness among older millennials and Gen Xers, along with the constant mainstream jeremiads about the decline of sex, the inexorable draining of sexuality from the world (echoes of Hölderlin’s withdrawal of the gods), is revanchist, and prefigures either a fascist future of universal eugenics and Lebensborn programs, devoted to the sexual enslavement of the species, or a near-future, closer than one might expect, in which fucking has been abolished, or faded away, along with the money system, labor, the male sex, etc., all that shit Valerie Solanas wrote about. In the meantime, a spiritual disciple of Cronenberg, I carve my anima into my very flesh, I tattoo my name in Hebrew on my neck, Leila, לילה, daughter of the night, goddess of sex and the transmigration of souls, eternal flower and mirror, who is also the agent of the return to oblivion, to forgetfulness, to the unmaking of the flesh: time itself.
..On the first truly hot day of summer, I languish inside in bed and discover a few things online that disturb me in a way that I can’t shake for the entire day. 1) there’s another Ivy-League educated leftist Jewish trans girl from an upper-middle class background who wrote a book that’s a psycho-somatic geography of the first year of hrt, about a girl just like me who falls in love with a normie cis girl, a business school student named “Lily” (my “Sara,” who also wanted to go to business school to “impact systems of oppression” or whatever, and in the book they even have exactly two dates, as I did with Sara), speculates about the ungovernable nature of desire and its relation to the symbolic structure of power and reality, takes a lot of ketamine, has a lot of weird sex, etc. Reading the first ten or so pages of this book feels like an assault, feels like that scene in the new adaptation of Dead Ringers where Rachel Weisz is having a mental breakdown and doing coke on the rooftop of her Manhattan apartment with a schizo homeless woman who taunts her in an obscene monologue, identifying her (Rachel’s) cucky sexual obsession with her twin sister as a parasitical fear of cellular division, of disappearance, while the other, the twin, multiples, self-enhances, towards wholeness. And there’s something about the respectability of this trans woman, who’s established and writes for Art Forum and is a clinical psychotherapist and has all the same politics as me, writes about all the same themes as me, but in a more academic, sanitized, but still poetic way, that makes me feel like I lost too many years to mental illness, that I somehow didn’t keep my finger on the pulse, that I became too lumpen-oracular at the expense not only of self-advancement but of authenticity, because I forgot to acknowledge my position as a class oppressor in the introduction to my first book while simultaneously issuing a vague disavowal of identity politics, so what if when my books come out, if they ever come out, everyone reads me in bad faith, as someone who’s trying to mystify her origins, who mystifies transness, hides behind a kind of picaresque machismo, slumming it as a sex worker after she slummed it as a leftist in Latin America, a quixotic thief of social capital, someone with definite boundary issues, etc.? But I never claimed universality, I never saw myself as the universal human, a lot of my youth was lost in a schizophrenic fog, to addiction, travel, books, sex, illness, I gravitated towards the margins because that’s where gravity brought me, and on a good day I can love myself for all this, can get turned on by my angelic perversity, but on a bad day, I’m absolutely dysphoric, I see myself from the perspective of an inscrutable and cynical intelligence, that primal shame engulfs me, and I want to die. Sometimes, when I listen to Mitski, I forget that her Daddy probably helped run Duvalier’s death squads in Haiti, did some fucked up shit in Angola, etc. Not that it really matters. Art emerges from a subjectivity steeped in history, in barbarism, but ultimately it has very little to do with its origins (and everything to do with them). Artists, like the dead, are ultimately not responsible for their crimes (which is to say that artists, like the dead, ultimately have no Daddies). “Wild women don’t get the blues/But I find that/Lately, I’ve been crying like a tall child/So please, hurry, leave me, I can’t breathe, etc.”
..Good-looking white men with some shady Nazi views be getting pussy left and right, Xylea said. She also says, on the phone with some guy, that she listens to Nazi punk, sometimes, it seeps into punk as a whole, the dazzling blue eye of a serial killer in the center of the mandala that is punk. You listen to Nazi punk, Xylea?, I interrupt her, disdainfully. She looks embarrassed. I’m the only one she cedes a kind of moral authority to, an authority of taste, too, and she backtracks. Then she says it’s worse that Coco Chanel was a Nazi spy, that fashion houses have real power, unlike musicians, that she read a book as a kid portraying Coco as a scrappy little French maiden girlboss, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Now it doesn’t matter that she listens to Nazi punk, she’s reframed the Gnostic evil of the world. Xylea’s dad is a Nazi, her ex-boyfriend is more or less a Nazi. She’s an esoteric acid Christian, her current boyfriend hates the colonizer religion, worships the Aztec gods.
..There’s this beautiful nineteen year-old brown kid who works the counter at the liquor store on College Ave. and who hits on me shamelessly every time I come in. I’m used to brushing off men, but this kid, with his gorgeous eyes, in his white beater, leaves me totally mesmerized, tongue-tied, and stupid. The reason I know he’s nineteen is because I told Alayna about him and she was like yeah he’s a charmer, he hits on everyone and everyone falls for him. Yesterday Harvey asked me what age I like men at the best, sexually, and I was like mid-forties, because they’re desperate but their dicks still work and their bodies aren’t gross yet, well some of them, and they said no early thirties, because men at that age are beginning to know themselves, to be more comfortable with themselves, they have that melancholic edge, but they’re still young, still hot. Then I told them about the kid at the store and we both started talking about really young men, boys essentially, like nineteen, twenty, etc., usually they’re men of color, the ones with that angelic halo, deeply aware of their sexual charisma and yet so nonchalant about it, they’re like the sun, Harvey said, yes, exactly, like the sun, I said, and they started telling me about this coke dealer in Sacramento who’s like that and how they buy coke from him when they don’t even want it and dress up in their sluttiest outfit and just giggle like a schoolgirl at everything he says. I couldn’t fuck him, though, they said. It would be too intense. What would I do with my body? That’s right, I said. You can’t fuck them, just like you can’t fuck the sun. It’s enough to feel their light, their heat, throughout your entire body, for days afterwards.
..The last girl I really had penetrative sex with, besides a few fumbling attempts, the last girl I came inside, let’s say, was Colette, the psycho-in-a-hot-way girl from Montreal with the abusive UFC fighter husband with incurable cuckold fantasies. That was like less than a month into hormones. Honestly if I think about it, I miss it, and yet all the sexual energy that used to be concentrated in my dick feels like it’s suffused my entire body, and spilled out beyond my body, as in a warm bath in paradise.
..In the last years of our relationship, the only thing that kept me and Rebecca together, besides our alcoholism, was our love of movies. With her by my side, I slid into delirium tremens in evening movie theaters, a backpack full of diet coke bottles that were mostly rum, watching moody meandering Chinese noirs, Peruvian sci-fi flicks that were also pornos (or maybe it was the other way around), an old Dennis Hopper movie, etc. Naturally, my memory of these movies, like those years in general, is spotty, a kind of melancholy pool into which pours a waterfall of pure horror. Last night I started watching this Chinese movie and it felt like I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t remember any of the details of the plot. But there were these haunting images that kept recurring that I felt tied me to some lost evening with Rebecca: a magical book of poetry, a whore with a bloody lip, a femme fatale in a green dress, a sentimental butch behind bars, a philosophical gangster obsessed with the past, rain, shards, a tunnel, streets that are memories, muddy reflections, that bend and warp into nightmare dimensions, an elliptic conversation in a room that never ends…
..Now I picture her watching a movie like that with P.J., who has no attention span for anything but his poorly defined impulses, while he drones on about how the Chinese criminal lumpenproletariat are enemies of the state, bent on capitalist restoration.
..I don’t know how to explain to these annoyingly pious leftists that I liked Oppenheimer even though it didn’t talk about the theft and ecocide of indigenous land or the victims of Hiroshima because it’s a Jewish story, about the tragedy of the Jewish mind in its final stage of exile, Oppenheimer the mystic administrator of the Amerikkkan warfare state, knowing he was killing once and for all the messianic within history, killing the Messiah, in tandem with the Nazi concentration camps. And of course the Black Hundred deep state reaction is called forth inevitably, the penultimate pogrom, the killing of the second-to-last Jew. I don’t think Oppenheimer regretted making the bomb or anything, I think he simply recognized that the human species had run its course, and he was going to give it a little push into the abyss.
..In terms of violence, in terms of planetary annihilation, I don’t see why fascists should get to have all the fun.
..I cannot express how much I hate the sissy faggot J. Edgar Hoover archetype of the Amerikkkan soul: the sneering, panting cuckold in the closet of history. In the eschatological war, stupidity, which is to say brutality, is its own advantage.
..Samy, a Brazilian with that South American hippie anarchist vibe I miss so much. It makes me think of drinking fernet cokes in an underground art space in Buenos Aires with a shitty punk band playing in one room, a political symposium in another, an orgy in a third, everything pervaded by an atmosphere of fun and catastrophe: the lost tertulias of twentieth-century Latin America, last evenings on Earth. She calls me beautiful, just published her first book of poetry “on different conceptions of being,” makes photo collages, in the apocalypse she plans to return to the land to make art with the materials nature gives her. I want to make out with her and talk about art, fuck on the beach at night, I want to get vertiginously drunk with her, though I don’t drink anymore (and when was the last time I talked about art or fucked, really fucked, with my entire body and soul?).
..Nothing lasts. One by one my ties to the past disappear, materially, in terms of my affects, my affections. The image of Beryl’s body that winter in Somerville, impossibly thin, a dark bedroom, the sound of her pissing after sex, rabbits munching in the corner, a glass of mezcal, what books did we talk about?, what do you like?, she asked, I like to be choked, she said, this affair wouldn’t last past the last snow, the one I spent in Rebecca’s new place watching Pasolini’s Salo on a beanbag chair, which for awhile was the only “furniture” in the living room, we made it through the spring, the summer, she graduated, had another birthday, her depression got worse, there was the scare over the brain tumor, the reunion in Berlin, desperately clawing at each other’s bodies, incapable of being apart, incapable of anything, a trip to the Plötzensee, to Leipzig, sex in the morning, afternoon beers by the river, the Pergamonmuseum, all those Eastern European countries seen by train, the day in September I landed in Santiago, 2013, vanished. What is the point of remembering? Simply to feel the pain all over again, a fading reality in the midst of so much unreality: night within the night…