PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A MANIFESTO OF WOMANNESS IN MULTITUDES, OR

A TOPOGRAPHY IN FIFTEEN CHAPTERS

CHAPTER 1: TRANCE-MISSION

winter bodies
pink skies
female privacy as magic
solitude as strange power

Long hair, blood drips, empty beds, dark skies, the written word, the spoken word, birdsong, my song, plants sprouting new roots, new growth, my body in prayer, in motion, in meditation, in devotion, in depravity, in desire, breath, blues, technology, dirt, his gasp of pleasure, the light through my camera. All of it, strange magic. >>

CHAPTER 2: QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

electric energy
underworlds
topside magic
the living metaphors of home

The safety of the known, the seen, the illusion of the visible world. To turn from the night was to turn too from cycles, waxing/waning, polarity, opposition, surrender, seduction. I couldn’t stand at the jaws of nightfall and let it consume me because I couldn’t yet recognize within that nothingness the intimate face of creation. >>

CHAPTER 3: DUALITY AND DREAMSPACE

new ghosts
everyday mysticism
potting soil
Jung’s dreamwork

A fluid domain. Anti-narrative. Flow and overflow, overflow and retreat. “Wherever there is abundance, it seems, it will be accompanied by the forces of ecstatic devouring.”⁴ I wrote: the soul in love and in question, and it remains in my mind unceasingly, an incomplete yet unbroken intention. >>

CHAPTER 4: SOFT TERRORS

the femme-enfant
her mother’s camera
tattoos on his hands
The Rolling Thunder Logbook

What is the dance between reclaiming the self and allowing it to be consumed? “There is a powerful saying: Elle habla por en medio en las piernas, ‘She speaks from between her legs.’”³ I drove my soul a hundred miles into dry earth just to sit beneath the planets as they recrossed the signature of my birth. >>

CHAPTER 5: SHADOWPLAY

slide film
neon pink lights
new watercolors
wrapped in blankets

The instant my body split open again out poured all the darkness in equal measure to the light. Topside sight creates secret underworlds just as vast and fertile and complex. Leaves in my hair again. I find them later as I’m trying to wash a strange taste from my mouth. So many beings are alive within me simultaneously. >>

CHAPTER 6: AT REST

moonside
ocean drives
tarot as form
trying to find the words

We all ravage our own wilderness unfeelingly. Is it enough to divest from this belief structure on my own? I’d like to think so but what of the established tide of the world that still beats against the shore of my beingness in the rhythmic wave of more, more, more… >>

INTERLUDE: SEVEN GATES

CHAPTER 7: AT THE EAR OF WATER

open studio
the gift of
metaphorical veiling
The Empress

By week’s end the hills of Los Angeles smell of jasmine, filthy and electric. I drip the syrup of tuberose into my bath and watch it melt across the surface. Desire is the witch’s prayer, she says and I laugh out loud through my meditative state, my prayer-trance. Desire is the witch’s form and it cares nothing for my restless mind. >>

CHAPTER 8: AMOR FATI

animal medicine
heavenly mother
strangers in the aisles
rage

Surrender as negative drift⁵. As blood messages⁶. As the strange ritualized grace of aikido⁷. Body metaphors. “It is why, I imagine, the Sumerian goddess Ereshkigal is the Queen of Hell and also the Mistress of Life, constantly portrayed in a position of giving birth.”⁸ It’s why her sister is Inanna with her back against the tree, the pleasures of her body birthing a dream of power.⁹ >>

CHAPTER 9: BLOOD MOON

collage novel
coffee in bed
the terror evoked
pale lilac

Sometimes I don’t want to tell a story, I want only the revelations of chaos. Sometimes I don’t want to know what’s real and what’s invented, what is ocean waves and what is sunken shore. Sometimes I want the girl to become a serpent³ instead of a woman. Sometimes I want to let all time and place build upon one another like wood piled high for a bonfire and then dance around its flaming warmth. >>

CHAPTER 10: EVERY EVERYTHING

pushing furniture
neroli & seawater
body paint
off the grid

There is not, nor shall there ever be, any possible way to describe the pressure of this everything, nor the riddle of its melody as it echoes still through my mind, nor the way the weight of that everything has changed over the years, from a source of rage to a site of magic. He said everything like a curse and I alchemized it into the ecstasy of infinite possibility. >>

CHAPTER 11: NIGHT BLOOMING

left-side vision
spring cleaning
early morning heat
mercury in aries

At the height of summer’s heat I dreamt¹ of the Queen of Bondage. Bondage/ing, I can’t remember which. The code of union². I awoke with her image still fresh in my mind amidst the smoke of morning, the smoke of fireworks, the smoldering ashes of us. Shunga photos. Peaches and plums. She was all in black atop a throne adorned with wolves and hawks and blooming hothouse flowers. >>

CHAPTER 12: AN ANDROGYNE, THE MOON

dream cycles
Daybook
Woman in Armor I, 1938
disguise vs. unmasking

All that is nature and all that is cosmic and all that is female-bodied teaches us that life itself cannot exist without the void. Nor creation of any kind. These are the blood messages. The burden of alchemy. Void we come and void we go and through voids we pass, ritualistically, privately, unseen-ly, as a bridge from one skin to the next. >>

CHAPTER 13: STRANGE CREATURES IN DOMESTIC SPACES

a. breast
b. elbow
c. forearm/eye-lashes
d. lips

Circe’s temple with moon snakes and future tongues. A poet of the earth. My being born of earth and air but with the rhythms⁶ of the sea. Milk and bloody and honey. To erase our “centuries of partly-conscious experience of silent complicity in a myth we did not choose.”⁷ “Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.”⁸>>

CHAPTER 14: IN SATURN

scent memory
Make the Road by Walking
hawks circling
clean sheets

A few days later he asks me again, in the morning again, in the sun again, like gently taking my temperature. By then my whole self is rinsed clear by the shock of nature, by the unbroken night⁴ as it stretched above my sleeping form. Are you happy, he asks and as I start to equivocate he pins me still. >>

CHAPTER 15: RECLAMATION

swimsuits
prototyping
blooming cactus
sleepless

What might it look like to reclaim the generative, healing energy inherent in a woman’s body for a woman’s body? Or for nature! Unapologetically self/centered. I think about this constantly and how different the world might look as a result. What new inventions. What fresh philosophies. >>

womanness as

Last update: May 22, 2022 4:02PM GMT+2 YR2-2022

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A MANIFESTO OF WOMANNESS IN MULTITUDES, OR

A TOPOGRAPHY IN FIFTEEN CHAPTERS

albums: Theater of Love, Highway 104, summer 01, tantric currents, autumn 02, winter 03

womanness as

Last update: May 22, 2022 4:02PM GMT+2 YR2-2022

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A MANIFESTO OF WOMANNESS IN MULTITUDES, OR A TOPOGRAPHY IN FIFTEEN CHAPTERS

albums: Theater of Love, Highway 104, summer 01, tantric currents, autumn 02, winter 03

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A MANIFESTO OF WOMANNESS IN MULTITUDES, OR

A TOPOGRAPHY IN FIFTEEN CHAPTERS