Sometimes the body betrays us. Sometimes the body acts out with a consciousness that seems far removed from the fevered convolutions that supposedly animate it. ‘Supposedly’ because sometimes the body seems to know a far deal more than we give it credit for, and its occasional tremors, its sudden tinge and pallor in the wine-stained evening, with the tight skein of drums vibrating the night’s venom in the body’s veins, with the maracas circulating their seeds infinitely within themselves, with your black dress torn right up the thigh and a heel hanging off your shoe like a hangnail, like a martyred limb: the body knows all these things and many more that weave and fret like the silver trails of fish beneath the cool drugged surface of a late spring day.
I am too intense, she says. I cannot look at you for too long, I feel like you will burn me, like you will try to consume me with your eyes. Eyes are nothing, I say, just semi-transparent sacs of vitreous jelly and a few discs of blind color spinning in the void. Nothing. There is the glint, she says, there is the gaze. I say, the gaze is not in the eye, it is in the muscles around it, the dozens of tiny fibrillations that set the brow and cheek to such minute poses of meaning, that shade or slice or haze or slit the eye: that is what the gaze is, nothing more. No, she says, you are wrong. You are wrong wrong wrong. There is something in the eye, there is something that floats at the very center, something the light must refract around like an inverse prism, repulsing the rays and transforming them to coherence. That is the thing, that is the gaze, that is the hypnosis that begins the gravitational movement between two foreign bodies: this vortex, here, in this scrawl of milky light. But you are too intense. It is as if that vortex in you has grown till it has become all of your eye, till there is no difference between the center and the surface. How can I look at you when you look at me from inside such unbounded chaos? It is like looking into space. I have no orientation.
I listen to what she says and know that it is true. I cannot keep living like this, skinless and raw, exposing all the red sinew to the people who try to want to love me, whom I want to try to love. I must not keep pushing against the electric fences at the limits of control. I know no caution. I am like a wounded leopard who charges at the hunters who seek its death, who leaps out from beneath the safety of immovable things and extinguishes itself in a haze of gunsmoke and blood. If there is glory in this, the dead cannot know it. I am here, perpetually wounded, seeping life from my cut stomach, my grazed haunches, my slit lip, here behind a rock or in the wet darkness of a cave, waiting for the footsteps of approach, waiting for the moment that will consume everything.
I must learn caution. I must learn to hide the danger of my spots, the final desperation of a wounded animal. Perhaps in hiding there is hope. To hide is not to deceive. To hide is to retract the claws that would break the skin that wants to reveal you. To hide is to believe you can live for at least one more day.
