switch / blade

1we are suffering from a lack of empathy. (and yet we have so much, too much, we are crying, drowning in tears!) i don’t just mean a lack of empathy. we are also struggling with the idea that someone else could have empathy for us. we love to publicly attack each other. reading someone is a skill. we love to “set someone straight”.  we are very set in our conviction that people cant understand us–though at the same time fairly sure we understand them. we are collectively teenagers, it might be argued. unable to see that we are similar, similarly different, but similar none the same. the idea that some one would dare to be like us or attempt to be like us only makes us more angry. how dare they? try? attempt at empathy? they know nothing of what it is to be like me. and it is easier for all of us to stay that way. in fact it is easier. yes somehow we struggle with empathy and even the hope of empathy because there is something dangerous in the feeling of empathy. it is easier not to feel it, or attempt to feel it. it is better not to suggest that someone else could feel it. because there is something controversial in it. to say that one can understand another persons point of view risks everything we know and have build around different. to suggest that difference needn’t be such a gulf makes us risk what we know of ourselves, the differences that we have built up around understanding what we are. sometimes it is easier to understand what we are not.

2I don’t even know what I’m into anymore. I don’t even know what its about . Is it which bodies make me feel wet. Is excitement generated somewhere else, does it generate over time. Is it intellectual. Is it in the fantasy. Sometimes its who my partner desires, I embody her desire. Sometimes is the person I encounter on the set. Sometimes its the person who I am working for.

I had this idea before I started doing sex work that my experiences with clients would be really compartmentalized: not sex, not a turn on, not “thou whom I desire, object of my desire.”

And yet what I realize is that all these experiences sex/work/performance/art, stage and bedroom, stage and bedroom, are simply part of the pantheon, taking their position somewhere within the spectrum of experiences I’ve had with people, us little people, with sharing knowledge, clumsily, stumbling through, as best we can, speaking of our desires, as best we can, messing up, being awkward, doing or not doing. There is intimate and exquisite and spiritual desire, this does indeed exist. But it is not bound to rules of engagement.

So when I think about having sex with someone, like really really getting really excited about someone, its about something other than the body itself, I mean what it looks like. Im into some kind of possibility of intellectual, spiritual encounter, acceptance, radical thinking, compassion, wanting to stay in the moment, wanting to explore something about the body deeply, about impulse from one body to the other—this turns me on.

3I want(ed) to experience through my body. I want(ed) to build my voice through the only voice I could truly own—or so I thought—through my own body. If I am a discursive phenomena, body BE COMING perhaps this voice CAN be formed with other voices “not my own”? I wanted to experience that discursive process of dynamic becoming and contradiction. I wanted to express my connection and culpability for violence in the world of structural violence of which I am a part, of which I am inside of, I am part of, the world which is creating itself. I wanted to express both my condition in moment as well as the possibility of subverting my self—self as presented encased in fleshy body, self as presented encased in conditions of my creation, (class ethnicity, historicism, knowledge, experience). I want(ed) all these things. I am in constant failure.

4I cried tonight, finally. Tears keep rising out of me when I cum, keep tearing out from my cunt. Wont come out through the eyes sometimes. Tonight they did, instead of anger, I could cry. So often it shifts to anger and to blame; tonight it stayed in sadness. I am sad about cliché things, one could say. One could ignore it. I cried with nostalgia. I cried for moments waiting in a phone booth without a quarter. I cried for when I walked into a room and no one was looking at a screen, heads bent, for a time when they looked up at me and smiled. I cried for when things felt more joyous. I cried for when I was listening to one CD and I just came home and put the same one on again and listened to the whole thing. I cried because I could visualize all these people, collectively raising a blue thumb at each other from across a hundred thousand kilometers of rented independent workspaces, all collectively saying, yes, yes, yes, I agree with you, you are doing a great job. Cried because the validation is real and yet still we all must keep working at our desks, just to survive. Just to be there. And we don’t even know, anymore, what to do with the time we have, if we have it. I cried for a time that we knew more of what to say to each other. When we waited for the bus and stared. I miss staring. I know, it is all very sentimental. I am aging. I cried because I realized there is no going back, that I can resist and push back and visit the countryside and “get offline”. I can even be outside of it but still– the world is not going back—and I am part of the world. There is no going back to that old world. Because it was in fact a longing to be in the world, fully connected and fully in the world, but for those connections to just move slower.

5 I love getting older because I discover so many new things about my cunt / our cunts. I discover that it is a crying orifice like my eyes, like my nose. Not just that it can ejaculate—ejaculate has been blown up in my mind so much, like a “thing every sex positive person can learn to do” or a kind of explosive device, a thing to accomplish. It is those things, but I think this is why for many years, concentrating on the idea of ejaculate (on doing or not doing) I missed the more crucial point. But the fact of my cunt ejaculating, milking itself, is a thing that happens in various ways, various ways of crying. Not all cries are explosive, some are soft and runny. Some come out silently. Some are cries of happiness. Inside my cunt there is a tear duct, like the tear ducts in my eyes. It leaks; it releases. I understand my cunt as another emotional center. Then when we are together and we are touching this tear duct, when we are feeling around inside my emotional center, so many new things are appearing and coming out, sometimes explosively, sometimes softly, sometimes as a deep and mournful growl. A long low rumble. To say that one is sad and one is happy or one is a release of anxiety and one is negative or positive … they are all true and untrue. As an emotional center, it is always mixed, murky, a big soup of emotions that push the tears out. To accept the murky mix of emotions located there frees me from the idea of what it should or should not be doing or feeling. It is not just “ecstasy,” – though perhaps we understand ecstasy as this mix of emotions, which is why it feels so good.