May 14


after a bath

I am waiting for my costume to arrive for my show coming up in London at the end of the month, The Musical Theatre of Love, part of the Wild Gift exhibition.  I don't want to give too much away here, but is a highly stylized & complex outfit – sexy, but strange, almost a cartoon.   It is very different from the jeans and shrunken suit jackets I wear everyday, as the love artist & as myself, but then they're a costume too.

I will be myself anyway, of course.  I am myself. I believe in Love & I believe in Truth & I believe in The Moment at Hand between two people, unadulterated.  But the quiet listener in me is feeling a little bit claustrophobic.  I want to feel a little bit bigger.  I want to play harder & I want to take you with me.

There comes a point in almost every love session where the person who has come to me tells me that they are a loner.

I say I know. I am one too. I am.

I asked Elle about it this morning on the phone.  She was asking me about a very flirtatious appointment I had been anticipating & I was lamenting the awkwardness of it, even though I knew inside that it had been spectacularly intimate & how much each of us had been touched.  But no real touching happened . . . til the very end & the repeated hugging & a surreptitious snog into the little hollow under the jaw, the michaelangelo drift of the fingers on leaving.  It was so earnest, too earnest really for a casual kiss -- how could I take something that wasn't mine?

I remembered an appointment last month in London where I just went for it, smashing through that tiny crack, the window of it sometimes open only for a second, a head-on collision make out session, just to prove that I still could.   There was a thrill & I felt awfully cocky but although I obsessed about it for a few days, it evaporated quickly.

Elle says as humans we really aren't all that social.

She says I question what I am doing because I think nothing happens & I think nothing happens because it is right & I don't have to make anything happen.

When I first started to love people as art I loved to be the bad girl & it was all about seduction.  It was all about pushing up against being afraid & jumping of the cliff & wrapping someone up in me & despite my pirate high, I must say it rarely ended well or cleanly.  I felt strange then & I feel sad now, a lot of the time, but I feel clean now when I look my lovers in the eye.

Is not this ringing chill up the spine, the quivering of the scalp, the TRUTH, is that not love?   
Not a love for but a love within? 

Does love have to be delivered to be real?

What is the skin that stops between me & my art patrons?  What is the skin?

Comments

[vc]

"I know about disguise . . . the camoflages I use are elaborate, but I know what they are . . what if my body is the disguise? What if skin, bone, liver, veins, are the things I use to hide myself? I have put them on and I can't take them off. Does that trap me or set me free?"

jeanette winterson

keep up this good work xxxxxx