Ellipsistor Radio

Ellipsis. Transistor. Radio.

Tunes on repeat this week:

1) Default by Django Django

2) All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem

3) Midnight City by M83

On Vulnerability

I need to feel your warmth, sweet one.  All that came before, the aggravated musings of a self-righteous narcissist, it is all just so mindless. I claim to know myself so well, claiming that certain aspects of my personality show that I am so optimistic and positive and unburdened and not jaded, that is all so much rot. I do not know myself well at all. I am beginning to think I am terribly afraid of being vulnerable and allowing you to see me naked, not just physically, but emotionally, and this scares me so much it renders me unable to function around you sometimes. It all started out so easily, I could use the first few months of being with you as an excuse as to why I refused to let you in. Now those months have passed, and I have built up a wall… I think I am discovering that I always erect walls, with everyone. I feign disinterest and create distance even as I silently scream to hold you closer. No one knows me truly. I don’t know me truly. I want to.

 I want to be able to tell you, with words, that I love you, instead of holding them back so hard that my eyes burn with suffocating, silent tears. They end up streaming down the side of my face, pressed up against your cheek as we make love and I beg you to stay on top of me afterward, your hands tangled in my hair at the base of my neck… it tickles in a dreamy, erotic way, the way your fingers are so long and warm, your chest expanding with your soothing, rhythmic breathing, pressing into me, sinking me further into the folds of the sheets. A little cocoon, you wrap me up. In this moment I have surrendered, barriers stripped away for a moment, but still I cannot speak and say the words, my tongue has become an enemy I cannot shake. The barriers rush to reassemble, colossal ocean reefs teeming with dark recesses, a veritable labyrinth to lose myself in…. running from you even as I lay happily trapped in your embrace. Never let me go. I dread the moment you roll away, even though I tell you to go. I am still reeling in the sudden absence of you…. Then you come back, your arms and chest and hips and lovely smooth skin curling into a cave for me to crawl into. We begin the falling dance of sleep. Your right hand slips under my neck, your fingers intertwine with mine. Your left arm slides over my hip, and I pull it up toward my chin so I can kiss it. I love giving you kisses…. I love it when you…. I love your kisses. All these are just ways for me to indirectly tell you I love you, the cowardly way to say it. I am a coward.

I am afraid it will not be returned, this feeling I have for you. I fear dismissal, I fear abandonment. It is silly, really, for I have only been dropped on my heart a mere handful of times, but like an emotionless scientist I take these isolated events and string them together in a senseless theory of how love works and that I equal someone to be left and disregarded squared times E to the ninth power divided by X.

Love is not a science. I don’t even know if it is possible to define love, but maybe love is when two people push each other to become better, to question our own modus operandi and reflect. Maybe love is tangled up in the uncomfortable moments that come from vulnerability. I know it is intrinsic in the way you weave through people to stand so close to me, hand on my back and brilliant, bright blue eyes snagging mine.  I see it locked in your steel trap of a mind that picks up on the smallest little details surrounding us. I feel it in your endless patience when I cannot finish a sentence or I become all foggy-headed and vacant and you are still there when the confusion lifts. Even if it doesn’t lift, you don’t try to force me back from wherever I have gone. I don’t know where I go when this happens. Those moments are lost to me, little clouds of dense storms, impenetrable.

I am building up the courage to tell you to your lovely face that I have come to love you. I hope that I am able to tell you with a steady voice and confident glow, but most likely the words will end up spilling out of me like burning lava, quick let it out before it burns my lips and I twist the words and cover them in a half-hearted attempt at humor. I am resolved to say the words to you in my head, and allow each version of you inside my mind to answer with all the variations I might expect, so that when I do finally say it aloud I will have experienced all the various answers I might receive and not be surprised by your real response.  

You are teaching me patience, even though I have to relearn the lesson countless times, and will continue to forget it and relearn it, an endless, repetitive action of rolling stones up the hill only to watch them roll down again. You are teaching me to look closer and find the reasons why I do or say certain things. You are teaching me to look at myself and try to see what it is others see, the good and the bad, not the twisted and distorted view I hold of myself. Still an endless battle. But one I am waging because to be stagnant and unchanged is to die.

On Dichotomy

As artists, our perceptions of ourselves are vitally important pieces of the puzzling creative process. Much human thought is dedicated to the slightly narcissistic subject of a self-portrait, as it should be, for without our vociferous little egos we would not be gloriously human. My own self-exploration is a never-ending contest of wills, like so many other dynamic humans who have come before, in which one of me is consumed by the mundane identity of being ordinary, and the other is a flaming riot of extreme rarity guzzling the very air in the immediate vicinity, like loosened wildfire.

            When under the influence of the ordinary half of my personality, the artistic process I employ is a sad, entry-level drone operating at a low level of disconnect, an apathetic form of autopilot. Most often, this state is encouraged by real-world deadlines, disinterest in a certain subject matter, and crippling fear of failure. I think it is prudent to read ‘failure’ as ‘mediocrity’, because I must be as honest as I can be on the subject of myself. I hate to lose. Let me clarify that I am not referring to being in competition with others of my species; I am alluding to the ongoing duel between my dual personalities. It is not a coincidence that the theme of competition with oneself is a cultural axiom; it is a foundation stone in the definition of humanity. From this point of view, I am not unique. Every human on earth has, at some point, had the same fear of failure and mediocrity, the same feeling that we are interchangeable and not as worthy as we would like to believe. This feeling captures me, hangs me up by my toes and leaves me in the maelstrom wailing ineffectually, while I chip away at a piece of art, sculpture or two-dimensional painting, a melody, a piece of myself in tangible form, hoping to uncover an aspect of my own enigmatic soul that isn’t completely superfluous. In this mode of creation, I am searching for something unnamed, and it is nearly impossible for me to genuinely like what I produce. I hardly ever find what it is I am determined to uncover in a timely manner. However, I find that this process almost always leads to my own brand of divine madness, in a meandering, aimless, unpredictable kind of way.

            I have found that I cannot have one without the other, but mediocrity must come before the spark of ingenuity, or I speculate I would not fully appreciate the moment as it should be.  There I am, in my lady cave, underneath the house and chilled by several tons of dirt surrounding the concrete block walls, burdened by the feelings of inadequacy belligerently staring out at me from a blank page or a gesso’ed canvas, when it hits me solidly in the face. In the tiny space between moments, my hands are flying on wild atmospheric thermals, numb with disconnection from my spinning, singing brain, and as I work, parts of me coalesce into a whole I can jive with. It is a firestorm of activity born from a spark of uncommon clarity in a world distilled by doubt and reticence, and soon I am standing back from the piece, be it lyrics for a song scrawled across a page or stiff paper cut and glued and warped into a meaningful shape, that pleases me. This little bit before me, this little reflection of myself is someone I can understand; she may be a bit egotistical, whimsical, forgetful, blunt, but the negatives are harmonized by the genuine, sunny, empathic positives that hold up the other end of this precariously balancing human. I am simultaneously a curving, bellowing piece of sickly green and mad violet glowing against a backdrop of whispering, placid, dull red brick, enveloped by countless others who share the space, each a paradox in their own right.