The Bathroom Wall

(2018)

Writing has always been a gesture, an act, of extension. Bridge from the inner to the outer. The cerebral yearns to vomit itself out into the realm of the external. Splat. But it can never fully detach itself. That’s the problem. Hence the artificiality of that division between body and soul a French philosopher once insisted upon. The actuality being that the mystery is always firmly encased within the shell. The shell being more than just a container; it has a meaning, a logic all its own. And a writing all its own.

Still, knowing all this doesn’t cap the yearning. The closest we may come to extending that life that dwells inside us, of passing the border of the corporeal, of ejaculating on to the concrete of the perceptible, is to write it. Surfaces, surfacing. To use that perceptible as a surface for our mind-splatterings, and attain that severance that is needed when we zip up and walk away. Writing’s autonomy depends on that act of severance.

Lonely, seeking-for-connection. Another being, another body. We extend to connect, as well. In the hopes of. That we might reach some other being. Some other surface. Touch without touching. No. Full contact always best. Or else the writing remains inside us.

Being out in the world, having extended ourselves – not just mind, but body as well – through the writing, it is just as good as abandoned, unclaimed and unacknowledged, as it is bound to some authorial assertion. Some explicit reference to a singular body-mind presence. The point, the purpose, the carrier, is the gesture. The act of extension itself. The gesture that has occurred, the movement that has taken place, leaving its traces, its spillage, behind. There it is, all nubile and moany. Feel the weight of this substance all by itself. Ejaculated. Try and relish its detachment from the mind-body vehicle that spewed it forth.

The writer is the exhibitionist, the reader the voyeur. Both need each other in order for their roles to be fulfilled. But these roles aren’t mutually exclusive, either. Because reading, interpreting, furnishing meaning to this blank asignifying ejaculatory matter, is writing. And writing is reading. Everyone is guilty. Reading is just as pornographic as writing. You have to expose yourself, or else there’s no meaning there. The words on the surface – the page, the wall – are just bodies, nothing more, devoid of mind/meaning. It is when the reader comes round to molest those words with eyes that they inevitably become involved with horny fulfilled substance.

“I wrote that novel with a dildo up my cunt.” So said Kathy Acker once to an interviewer. She wasn’t the first. Pierre Guyotat also claimed to have written his notorious anti-novel Eden Eden while masturbating. And the Marquis de Sade? Likely. Writing (for now on used interchangeably with reading) is in its essence a bodily act. An act of the body. A performance, a getting-across. Just like fucking or shitting. It is performed by and for the body, extends the body into the realm of perception, the immortal, the stationary. Because the body has its own meaning, one that supersedes (over-writes) sense. (This is most readily understood by those identified or else branded with a so-called queer sensibility, no matter their actual sexual orientation, those who are, in a sense, defined by their desire, their status as desiring objects.) Scribble scribble. And it’s all spurned on by one mechanical force. That is: a messy, multiplicative, complicated and complicating force. The name of that force, that motor, is desire. And it malfunctions, spills, spews all the time. Yet it never ceases running. It can’t.