After spending the weekend moving to a new apartment—lugging boxes of books, clothes, and unused free weights to my new 4th-floor walkup—I woke up this morning feeling more than halfway dead.
I was very sick as a younger person, and so while in many ways I feel better now than I ever have, I’ve maintained a perspective on my own fragility that most healthy people lack. But as I wind my way through my thirties, my physical limitations are cast in a new light by aging, a process that many young queer people don’t expect to undergo. I certainly didn’t.
At 33, I am no longer raging against a body that failed me (or was failed by the state), but rather am adjusting to a body that is doing what it is meant to do inside of time, which is weaken and eventually fail, even if I am at the tail-end of a second puberty. My longest-standing intellectual, artistic, and somatic project being human impermanence and vulnerability, it’s satisfying, if not always comfortable or pleasurable, to be reminded that tender joints, sharper hangovers, greater risk-aversion, and a growing fondness for things I once associated with “old” people (nights in for yin yoga; home-fermentation projects; a desire to “nest” combatting the craving to trawl the streets for experiences of submissive breedability, as they say) are happening because I am well on my way to becoming one of them, if I make it that long.
Early in our relationship, I said something to Jade about “a goose walking over my grave,” and she was both delighted and appalled by the expression, which was new to her. I find the silliness of this old-school death referent to be bracing and reassuring, as if Untitled Goose Game were a memento mori. Reflecting on this tension between our aliveness and our death reminds me of two sequential undated entries in Wojnarowicz’s In the Shadow of the American Dream: In the first, he writes, “At times I feel like there’s nothing to be afraid of about dying. I mean, look at how many people have done so before me.” In the second, he trades his equanimity for dark panic: “I don’t want to think of death or virus or illness and that sense of removal that aloneness in illness with everyone as witness of your silent decline that can only be the worst part aside from making oneself accept the burden of making acceptance with the idea of departure of dying of becoming dead.”
And so, in the spirit accepting this mortal coil for what it is, please find below a few quotations on the subject that I’ve held onto over the years.
I think everybody should be a machine.
—Andy Warhol
I hate the fact that human bodies are warm. I think they should either be ice-cold or have no temperature whatsoever, like pieces of paper.
—some Dennis Cooper piece I found in a weird magazine in Bambi and Dahlia’s apartment
Appetite won’t attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel.
It’s true.
—Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am…But I’ll admit to this—even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another. If boys didn’t exist, I should have to invent them.
—Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence that dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination.
―Gloria Anzaldúa
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
—Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor
The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want to think big, Henry, for chrissakes.
—President Richard M. Nixon
Monstrosity: The self as a machine.
—Kris Krause, I Love Dick
“The garden of Eden,” pursued Mr Emerson, still descending, “which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies”
—E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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Ah, aging. I turn 60 soon, so I've thought about that, and transition, and having always felt frail, and repeated childhood surgeries—a lot. Yet somehow I have more stamina at raves now than I did 30 years ago.
wow. wow. “Appetite won’t attach you to anything…” wow wow wow wow wow