It begins with performance.
The hijacked subjectivity. The spectacle. Awareness and manipulation of gaze. Enjoying gaze. Employing gaze. Shape-shifting and addiction.
Some people, like me, are born to perform. We can’t help it. It’s all that we do: day in and day out, even when we are by ourselves. It’s like we’ve surrendered our souls to some all-encompassing reality show, except we’re not sure if anybody else is watching. Every frame of our lives: acting, acting, acting. For what? The contract was signed in blood. We were made to be looked at.
And there are more and more of us every day who are being fixed this way. Something about the internet and celebrity culture, and advertising, and MTV bloodsucking the American dream: we can talk sociology all day. There should be a law against looking, or something, because really, it’s such a trap.
I star in my own little personal drama, an epic poem in which every moment is connected to every other in a tapestry of personal symbols, an anti-heroic romance that flirts dangerously with metaphor and circumstance, each a jealous lover, but I want them both. I love it all. And I’m not afraid to fool one or play the other, bend the rules and cheat tricks, then pretend I didn’t do it, play nurse or play dead. God, it’s narcissistic, and so many other disgusting, clinical words.
The problem is: I leave a mess all around me. Destruction, chaos, everywhere. I’m clumsy. I wish I trampled more lightly, carefully, patiently. But gravity is beyond me, and I was born with it pulling at my bones; awkwardly I have been trudging on, in spite of warnings. Omens. I am too thick for this delicate life with its delicate people. I am like poison.
How to ease the toxins of entropy? The patterns that have made themselves so obvious, artless, the repeated lessons I repeatedly fail to learn? I hold my breath and try to squeeze myself thin. I hold in my garbage until it makes me sick. I live in my garbage, in refuse. I never meant to harm anyone.
But I exist. Thus harm.
The human virus, scourging the Earth. Let’s go back to primitivism. (Oh, I prefer words. I strongly prefer ideas to material things.)
We must transcend the problematic, suffering ego and give to others freely. We must live in community. We must destroy private property and Capitalism.
There, we said it. Done. Now that this hippie theory has been paid proper homage, I wanna take a deep dive into our mental dumpsters, find the memories and relationships that we can’t live with, and savor the rancid corruption of our egotistical logic. The nasty fucked up whispers we get scared of when we look into the mirror on a bad mushroom trip. We have to salvage it. It’s our duty as scavengers and decomposers. All those expired little secrets must be freed with honesty.
But that’s the spectacle in me speaking again, setting up the scene for a dramatic confession: Father, I have sinned. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it. Father, I have sinned and gotten away with it, and died a million times. Are you ready, Father, to be manipulated?
————–
The Fox Demon terrorizes Chinese history. Each dynasty falls to scandal, and empires crumble in arterial blockage. Kings get caught up in their concubines, and war logistics are thrown to the wayside. Seductive women are terrorists; they trigger the Kingdom’s undoing. Eve took one bite of some sacred fruit, and because of her dumb, disobedient hunger, we are all shot clean out of Eden, burning forever.
My grandma and I used to watch imperial soap operas every night on Shanghai’s CTV. I was four years old. One evening of my childhood, Da Ji, the Fox Demon, tried to hang herself to rid the Zhou Empire of her own evil and to save the King, with whom she has supposedly fallen in love. It was an act. He rescued her, lifted her slender and helpless body up from her silk suspension, and basking in his own heroism, the King felt more love for Da Ji at that moment than he’s ever felt for anyone. And so the fox charms her prey, holds him captive and strangles him by the rope of his own eyes, stronger than any silk. I learned second-hand from the CTV Fox Demon that death is beautiful on a woman, and sacrifice is stunningly feminine. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, unless you fake it.
Shakespearian heroines. Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona: the more beautiful you are, the less you deserve to exist, and your lessened existence only heightens your beauty. Even a shrew must play along.
I gaze down on men from a well-lit stage. Five feet one, with eight inch platforms to become five feet nine. You can’t have my number – baby, they don’t allow me to do that here – but I will take your business card with your generous tip.
———-
Chris was a fucked up manga artist. I met him online when I was fourteen: OKCupid, some profile compatibility bullshit, modern day oracle boners and e-masturbation express. He messaged me first. He had a naked picture of his ripped torso on his bio, and a really long ponytail that hung down to his ass. I had a photoshopped pic of me with makeup and my hair blowing in the wind, with the Shanghai port and skyline behind me. I wrote up a sassy profile too, completely false. (I was really just in it for the personality tests, I swear, but once I got onto the site, well, what the fuck, I might as well see what happens.) We had Thai food for lunch.
I took the subway to Brooklyn from my uptown apartment, wearing a nice button-down blouse my mom made me, a gray sweater-skirt, and black boots. On the F-train, I felt like Columbus; I felt like Cortez, ready to conquer every living testicle. I wore a push-up bra because I barely had any tits, I was so green and so curious. I told Chris I was seventeen because that sounded old to me; he told me he was thirty-five, and I couldn’t even fathom a number that groggy, but I didn’t care. He showed me his apartment and his manga collection. I wasn’t really into cartoons anymore, but I liked the careful little drawings with the whispery sight lines that he carefully erased and delicately inked over. I liked the thirty-second animation commercial that he drew for Burger King, with the wide-eyed manga protagonist in a sexy sailor/Catholic schoolgirl outfit kicking ass for burgers. Chris told me about his freelancing, and it seemed like kind of a lousy living to me: trucking your portfolio to all sorts of interviews for a lucky gig, but whatever. He was a real artist, and he lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone. And that, he told me, was how he knew he was successful.
Chris showed me tons of photos and stories of ex-girlfriends who looked like supermodels. He was pretty modelesque himself; thin and well-defined, he was into raw foods and the caveman diet.
He was into BDSM. He had strange action figures by his bed with their skins ripped off and clipped to wooden stakes, with eyeballs peeled from their sockets, and red veins on their ghostly faces like taxonomy diagrams. I freaked out when I saw those toys, and I hid in the bathroom for a few minutes, contemplating escape routes. I thought he might have been a serial killer. It excited me to no end. And then during dinner and all the following weeks, I secretively thought up scenarios in which I would out-kill him.
(Part of my ongoing fiction novela, see Sister Stripster)
