from Dear Herculine

} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:

In this is the dark ecology of my sex unfolding into space with other sexes, nebulas, and fibrous bodies.

In this is a kind of bestiary in which the “I” is every beast that is “I,” and this eye writes to another eye through a black epistolary that turns back into itself.

In this bestiary the term “hermaphrodite” exists as one of the more neutral descriptors of intersexual animals, I myself one amid many screeching.

In this “I” a twisted unfolding folding mass bubbling in an envelope called form, and multiple envelopes foam always into each other — the bubbles atop a vat of slime soup re-forming.

In this there are always already more derogatory terms for such bodies such as mine such as “freak of nature,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “sexual pervert,” and “unfortunate monstrosity.”

In this such derogatory terms pervade medical “literature,” this letter is not literature it is neon fat gleaming on the page, it is death’s opalescence.

In this words and bodies appear as things chewed out of lungs—phlegm, slime, and air in a teethy mouth hole’s hole.

In this such descriptors course in a queer organ that pulses these words through this blood as matter extrudes within a filthy ecology.

In this a fleshy pastiche that is the only access point to the trauma-tendrils that are labyrinthine and organic in every visible and invisible aspect of every capillary and circuit, monstrous and electric.

In this “I” folds this idea (this) into an unfolding folding like a wad of thin threads caught in the current of a fat pool, in the eddy of that which is rendering itself inexorable.

In this flooded room, a vomit full of mouth a fat gurgles until black bubbles foam out the sides their nightglow.

In this a body melted into a body melted, fat thick and slimy from eye to eye sluicing across the grotesquery.

} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:

When I say this is nature writing, I mean that I am an animal and that there is no outside in which one can stand to call this ecology “nature.”

This body, this I ecological, cannot step outside of the words “freak,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “pervert,” “unfortunate monstrosity.”

I let the words compose the way I go in the world.

The words surround from within.

The within roars from its trash organs.

The filth floats in the flood folding.

From the flood language inhabits us, infiltrating our thoughts and bodies, coercing ideas and movements, choreographing our little deaths. A flood language, a slime virus: it feeds on us, it needs us, and it lives in us. The reverse too: we feed on it, we need it, and we live in it. Language is a miasmic force engulfing. The miasma of the aroused genitals our air. Slipping obscurity. The hegemony rising up from the sexed gonads, the steam from the hot fruit entering and composing the architecture of the room. This is a text about rooms. This is a text about bodies in space. This is a text of creature textures variegating through envelopes and letters. The world an organic epistolary, composed of letters, pasted and folding into the folds and fissures inside bodies and rooms.

Dear Herculine,

A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX

***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING ARISTOPHANES’S SPEECH FROM PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM }

Aristophanes makes a comic myth out of heterosexual desire. He makes all bodies masculine and feminine distinct entities, wounded, in need of each other.

All of mankind starts off as a spherical whole, self-sufficient, powerful within the world. This spherical whole, the sphericity, of these sexed creatures reaches out into two heads, four arms, four legs, and two genitalia. They roll vigorously around the world sphere. These “natural” bodies come in three types: male, female, and androgynous. And even the androgynous mass has two perfect sets of genitals. They are “perfect,” round bodies that replicate the divine. When the human spheres anger the god spheres they are severed into two selves, male and female. They crave each other in order to complete themselves, to reach at the perfection they once had. And they hold each other, wound to wound. And those bodies re-affixed crave each other so hard they die. The gods pity their deaths because they need humans to give them offerings, so they give the bodies intercourse. They give them the need to fulfill their abstract monogamy physically, perfect genitals inserted into perfect genitals. These bodies lie as they lie.

What if we throw out this abstraction?  What if we eject the perfection? What if death was the regular state of things? What if divinity was stripped from the equation? What if all of the spheres, all of the blebs inside of blebs, were equaled in their power? What if death foamed?

Already dead, we would reproduce in the soil like cicadas, black fluid out our asses, viperously biological. Cicadas that are always already dying during intercourse, becoming fertilizer for the trees that house them. The weird energy that feeds the weird energy of the ecology. A black black blooded creature cult of organic velvet in a primordial cave collapsing the very shape of the cave itself. A shadow pastiche of unruly, humid animal intimacy.

A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX (cont.)

***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING HERMAPHRODITUS AND SALMACIS }

You stumble into Ovid’s description on the bookshelf and you discover a facet of yourself. You discover a third sex, a thing that explains yourself to yourself. You discover that Salmacis wove her nymph body sexually around Hermaphroditus, grabbing him below the surface of the bubbling water, touching his breast, kissing his pink flesh, wrapping limb around limb like octopus around a twig until the two of them transformed into a creature of both sexes.

But our flesh is not that simple, the merging is creaturely.

There is no “perfect” union, there is only the mess of biology, and the mess of body parts moving through space like a bloody finger poked into a bowl of flesh flavored gelatin. Descriptions of the actual meatiness of things never satisfy easy abstractions—bodies reform along their paths of formation like octopuses that reform their entire bodies to fit into a dark cave in the dank wet, again and again with each tide.

A LETTER AGAINST THE ABSTRACTION OF SEX (cont.)

***

{ A LETTER CONCERNING OUR BODIES AS CORPSES }

***

The longest of books are letters written to friends. Thick missives that are sent, that is written almost as if letters, out an unknown audience. A letter hurled out into thin air. If the humanistic tradition, at its diseased heart, is flinging a letter into a void, what does it mean to write a letter to a dead body? What does it mean to assume that my own body is a dead thing too. Dead because dying. Dying because dead. Dead because fed on dead matter unearthed as oil. Dead because lubricated with death fluid. Dead because. Barbaric. Uncivilized. Given to bestiality and violence. Given to bestiality because hermaphroditic, because monstrous, because that much more animal. Given to violence because reacting to being tamed, cut, reformed by medical discourse. Barbaric and uncivilized because an animal disciplined, utterly.

***

“Aristotle says, that we are punished much as those who were once upon a time, when they had fallen into the hands of Etruscan robbers, were slain with elaborate cruelty; their bodies, the living [corpra viva] with the dead, were bound so exactly as possible one against another: so our souls, tied together with our bodies as the living fixed upon the dead.”

-Reza Negarestani quoting Augustine quoting Cicero quoting Aristotle.

***

These letters are the memory of two bodies coupled until amalgamated by putrefaction. Two hermaphroditic bodies tied to each other’s corpses face to face, mouth to mouth, limb to limb, with an obsessive exactitude in terms of how the parts correspond like a dull black-blooded chamber music that runs through all of the chambers enveloping everywhere. Shackled to a rotting double, rotting in the space between, rotting in the space of the letters. Letting our agency become the agency of worms gliding through the dangerous dirt voids. Our skin obscures into grey brown rot, and spreads out into a continuity of black slime. We become the promiscuity of a rotting blood cocoon cocooning. We become the environment feeding the environment.