Soft-boned, Naked and Nerve-tender

May flowers of grief and desire

Untitled watercolor from a series of 2019 works loosely and collectively titled The Exquisite Arch, The Dancers, Eros and the Deadlock (It takes Two).

The feeling of loss comes like flashes of piercing light, puncturing tiny holes through my body, through my day. Weight pours in through these perforations and thickens around my organs, forming a second body inside in which a different me is gestating. I am being birthed through grieving. I am not emerging whole, but in small moments of worlding, slipping softly back into the day in my milky vernix, disoriented and soft-boned, naked and nerve-tender. This is when I feel it. Death and desire. Thanatos and Eros. It is an old tale. But I feel it is less as a drive, a condition of the psyche, and more of a calling-towards. It is neither in opposition nor denial of death, but an earthly pull towards the life that death produces. If you follow my work, if you know my art, you know that I don’t think that love and grief are walled up within us, residing in our individual emotional spheres, but are fields of intensities carrying the agencies of all kinds of life-living, the creative callings and curiosities of the more-than-human, the mattering of objects, weather whims, moods and appetites of the atmospheric.

The weight passes and leaves me–alive–and feeling the world in excruciating detail. I am simultaneously turned-on and overwhelmed by the too-muchness of sensation. Grief has taken me back to a pre perceptual condition of sensing without storying. Stripped bare of narrative’s organization and clear safe distance, I grope my way around, follow my nose, follow my ears. Improvisational music dances with me, music with lyrics hurts. Loud places hurt and confuse me. I struggle to follow directions or make decisions. I frustrate easily. I want to be alone. I want to be held. I want to touch everything. I want to touch myself. I am moved to tears by small acts of kindness. I have no patience. I want to tell everyone that I love them. I want, desperately, to rest.

Rest. What is it? How does a body–made in modernity, with all of its relentless imperatives towards progress and productivity, formed in capitalism, living in the current of hustle culture–recognize rest ? Is there a form of rest that isn’t engineered in the architecture of productivity, that isn’t replenishment for the sake of plugging back in? How might rest be a rewilding? Not a way of regaining coherence or returning to normalcy, but a going beyond the gridded boundaries of calendar days and what they should contain? How might rest be a deep dive into the internal night folded within each of us and the generativity of its dark waters? How might I lay my body down in rest so thick that I am claimed by a wildness that in no way promises to provide a path back to the known? Fatigued from all this dying and birthing, I abandon my tasks. I make tea. I pour hot water over dried flowers in a glass jar, watching them open gently, releasing color and fragrance. I drink in pink, purple, blue, pale green, yellow, brown. I stir in different combinations for the pure pleasure of observing the changes with my tongue, my nose, my eyes that want to linger longer on all the gently shifting hues so I spill–onto paper that puckers and buckles in response to the warm liquid, capturing the stain. Standing in the 3 feet of space between my Brooklyn-apartment-sized stove and second-hand Ikea butcher block cart, I am folded into soft, unclockable pockets of time.

I drift from the kitchen to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror. Who am I now? What am I now? How many women have stood here, losing parents, losing estrogen, looked at their reflections and wondered: what am I in relation to? As the ornamentation of youth wanes to reveal my own minor sociality*, I feel mutinous multitudes monstering in the wilds of me. I take in the creases in my skin that aren’t smoothed out by drinking water, slathering myself with lotion and getting a good night’s sleep. The delicate lines that trace my stories. The cartography of my cleavage, in which tiny grooves form and spread neckward, skyward, from the place where my breasts are pushed together in bras and clothes, showing me that there is always movement beyond containment. Maybe middle-aged woman in some lost ancient tongue means one who is reborn– into a body hormonally untethered by reproductive imperatives, into an open-gendered, pan-sexual relationality with not just other humans, but with the whole moving world. My hands explore, tracing these new pathways in my mushroom-soft flesh, these pleasure marks of difference. I breathe into my own touch, into this meeting place of touches, of fingertips and skin, of all that pushes towards the surface of a me that is a mobius strip of in-out, that is never singular, never just one. In the deepest part of our seemingly private self is a radically indeterminate unknowableness. The strangeness that is always there, in the synaptic spaces between all we think we know about ourselves and the world, comes into relief through grief’s touch. Grief doesn't just touch everything but is itself touching, is a form of touch, and changes how we touch and are touched by the world, including those we love. Our loved ones are still our loved ones but the shape of love changes, and our bodies, made in the sensitive interstices of our relations, change with it.

There is heat down below, an energy pushing up through the rich humus of love and decay, seeds of corporeal curiosities that will continue to flesh themselves out through this liminal body that is continuously composting the demands of coherence, shape shifting away from frontality’s fixity towards the inviting gaze of hundreds of sideways eyes. Freshly alive to death’s processual reveal, the erotic pulses through my grief-punctured body and radiates out in all directions, orange tendrils of sex moving outwards in a parthenogenesis of relations begetting relations. Grief waters the roots. I watch the May flowers open and think: that must hurt, a little.

*see Erin Manning