Sometimes you wake up and the world seems awry, like the picture on the wall is slightly askew and it has startled you into a momentary disorientation as to whether the world is tilted or the picture. This morning was such a morning. I woke up with the distinct sensation of unease like a throbbing under the seams of everything was palpable.
Then I saw this image, a painting by Francis Bacon, on a friend’s Facebook page:
My first impression was of a human body with a rabbit face, the eye being the first thing that caught my attention. Perhaps it was the closer detail of the eye in comparison to the rest of the impressionistic style of slashes of drab color. The friend who posted it saw an elephant immediately, which makes sense given the grey trunk-like extension in the middle of the image. It also comports with what is on his mind according to many of his posts, which support the eradication of ivory poaching and elephant suffering globally. So why did I see the rabbit face when another side of the optical illusion is the human bent in desolation matching the dread of the colors chosen? The rabbit eye is actually an ear that draws the viewer’s eye to the hidden face obscured by the angle of the painter’s view vis a vis his subject.
Of course the greens and browns that hit me immediately may have associated nature scenes to me, evoked from the colors alone. Maybe that’s why rabbit was conjured up before human. Or maybe I am feeling more like the rabbit these days, skittish and hunted, vulnerable. But the rabbit head atop a human-like body is the original dissonance–a nauseating angst of discord–I experienced in the nano second of mis-recognition, something in accordance with the strangeness of the day, a flash of something barely seen at the periphery of vision that flies past, something threatening and ugly.
That must be why I saw the rabbit atop the man and why my friend saw an elephant. It is what we imposed on the image from each our separate mindsets at the very moment of the eye’s placement on and registering of the image.
We do that to people too, obviously. We see them for the first time or for the four hundredth time and color them with the preoccupation or mood of the moment. We coat them with our predispositions and attribute motivations and traits to them based on the colors of our own palettes instead of seeing who they are in that space of estrangement, like mistakenly seeing a rabbit head atop a human body, which causes the looker to stop, readjust her vision, and focus more closely to actually “see” who stands before her.
I cannot face the blank page. I close my eyes, fingers frozen above the keyboard in readiness to strike the letters that form the words that fall into sentences, sentences to paragraphs, filling the blank with black. Writer’s block again. A surprise text from my beloved interrupts my agony as does the barging into my room from a disgruntled teenager who loudly complains she waited hours to no avail only to be denied the very coveted object of her desire, a new phone.
The phone rings and the voice to my ear asks me if I’m working. No, how can I? I ask where s/he is, s/he who must sneak love in a shoebox and an envelope of emailed bathroom love notes so the wife and children will not know. I love my love in so many ways: the sharp wit, keen pragmatic wisdom and common sense beyond most and all the while sentimentally apt to fall for a romantic tune and a sway dance, singing and sighing, even as s/he urges to bite and confine me with the unparalleled force of painful passion, the one s/he loves, destroy and own me. S/he is almost home, so s/he whispers a quick “I love you” and s/he is gone. The silent space fills the room. The laughter in the next room disrupts the delightful pain of longing. My life as me is a rocket ride of amazing torment and painful contentment.
The life of a mistress is one of denial, of empty space to be filled with fantasy of future memory. Her profile reveals a deep desire for punishment and deferred pleasure. She is judged and typecast as the scorpion fly, the Lilith of Eve’s prize, ever in human consciousness, but in reality, she is as fluid as the stories she floats in and out of, the ever flux of human flesh yearning for more in the quest for meaning. She provides links, fills hollow caves with patches of light, just enough to see the illusion of shadows. To judge is to play the fool.
Joyce Carol Oates in her essay, “They All Just Went Away” ponders the tendency of women to hurt themselves, to give up their space in deference to others. Each time I read this essay in preparation for class, I sink into her words.
Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ‘products’–only temporary strategies against extinction.
I think of humans coupling for love, marriage and children as survivalist needs for safety, security and self-perpetuation. Passion, however, is relegated to the realm of possibility and unpredictability. Sacrificing security is painful but paramount for passion, sometimes a worthwhile tradeoff. The mistress seeks and provides pleasure where safety breeds contemptuous boredom and the cancerous kill of the fire of desire, but there is a cost.
As a woman and as a writer, I have long wondered at the well-springs of female masochism. Or what, in despair of a more subtle, less reductive phrase we can call the congeries of predilections toward self-hurt, self-erasure, self-repudiation in women.
While the empowered mistress writes her role as protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain, and sadist and masochist as she loves with abandon and shadows love, aches in abandon, the nature of the mistress is often one of self abnegation and longing desire; threadbare hope and the coat of imagery warm the space, but the intangible is the self-inflicted torture, passion without presence, longing. She waits alone. This masochism is also the source of creativity of the writer. She, an other in self abnegating aloneness, borrows mystical moments of self-evisceration–the awe and radiance of others’ pain and joy–to disappear in their destruction and reappear in their resurrection Phoenix-like from the fire since passion burns born in torment. She is both agency and objectification, the meta-narrative of reading the reader reading the writer.
The writer is a mistress, with her drive toward self-punishment, in writing absolution and taking on the sins of others; she creates in hardship and pain, in triumph and longing desire, her shadowy figures tasked with completing the possibilities of the what if and should not. She is judged and critiqued. Her life drawings show us who we are. Sometimes she shows us what we don’t care to see or even dream. S/he tails the taboo.
Yet what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of self-hurt in the female? Abnegation in the face of another’s cruelty? Acquiescence to another’s will? This loathsome secret that women do not care to speak of, or even acknowledge.
I don’t know. I won’t be judged. The mistress and the writer are independent and free to choose their stories, write them with the beginning unknown, the ending imagined and the middle lived suspended in the shadow of the snip of the scissors’ ever-so-slowly closing blades.
Shadow Dancing
Your silhouette twirls me in a pony skirt umbrella.
I falter and still to take my bow to your dark smile.
My fingers fondle high cheek bones of ionic spin.
They poke through to the wall behind you in jest.
I stroke you yet thumbing the thin strands of hair.
You hover in my chest and feet dancing me witty.
Though silence spaces the crackled sonic voice.
It fills dark deep dread of distant lost connection.
So electrifyingly fill my ear in warm static breath.
Sigh trigger heat-pour down from my neck to toe.
Body-sense wisps of thin caress a sweet timbre.
A hand in tones transmitted in aural wood chime.
Shade palms settle upon the dip of my shoulders.
They soft sweep across the bones tracing burden.
Feather touched windless air drifts across my face.
I fall back into the deep curtsy of a shadow dance.
The song circulates my bloodless fill of time spent.
Memory kissed moth flutters of your lullaby sweet.
Twenty moons shine liquid ether ossify you to me.
In the gaze of the other 