The first time we talked about Kathy Acker was at the National Student Demo[1] at Sussex University. They were wearing a makeshift mask with only eyes visible and glitter purple eyeliner and perfect camp distance perfect queer austerity and they/we/they break windows burn things velvet mouth boots on broken glass and then we are sitting in a fucking meeting on the floor and we are angry because the boys wont stop talking and he is reading Queer Ultra Violence and I am reading Bodies of Work and he asks me what its about and so I show them her description of David and the Head of Goliath and we Google the painting and she says oh my god look at his sword and I say oh my god look at his nipples and we walk out of the meeting because democracy doesn’t work.
To know a thing is to participate in the knowledge it turns towards itself, and participation, which is the ‘absence of relation’, merges the subject of knowledge, which is not necessarily a human being, with the object known:
[1] On March 25 2013 Sussex University called a National Student Demonstration against privatisation at their campus near Brighton. Over 1500 students attended the demonstration, which was the culmination of over two months of Sussex students’ occupation of a major building at the university in protest of 235 jobs to be lost through the privatisation of the university’s non-teaching services. Shortly after the demonstration, a court injunction was taken out to ban any form of protest on campus and the occupiers were forcibly evicted by bailiffs and the police.
Accordingly, everything that presents itself to man as his knowledge of being is the reflex in him of the self-knowledge of the thinking in that very being. Thus, there exists no mere being-known of a thing; just as little, however, is the thing or being limited to a mere being-known through itself. Rather the intensification of reflection in it suspends the boundary that separates its being-known by itself from its being known by another; in the medium of reflection, moreover, the thing and the knowing being merge into each other . Both are only relative unities of reflection. Thus, there is in fact no knowledge of an object by a subject. Every instance of knowing is an immanent connection in the absolute, or, if one prefers, in the subject. The term ‘object’ designates not a relation without knowledge, but an absence of relation.[2]
[2] Christopher Bracken. 2002.The Language of Things: Walter Benjamin’s Primitive Thought. Semiotica 138. (227)
Their looks form a sphere or enclosure; they have made a world; looks reflect looks as the spread legs wind around the cock’s head and enclose it. The snake bites its own head. When two people look at/fuck each other, they don’t see anyone or anything else. [3]
A few weeks or months later I am reading Kathy Acker on their bed while he sends an email to Southwark council about housing benefits. His bed is on a boat and I read out loud:
“Do you want to fuck”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
I take my hand off his cock and grab his hand. I let his middle fingers stroke the delicate opening of my ass. He turns me over on my back’; he rolls on me, letting all the covers over his back cuddle him with my arms he slips his left hand under my right buttock, and slips his finger into my open wet asshole. A second of pain then throbbing pleasure. His cock jerks at my cunt. I let the pleasure overwhelm me I wait until I can’t wait any longer; suddenly I swerve around, stick my belly into the bed, just my ass against Peter Peter’s cock.
[3] Kathy Acker on Carravagio’s ‘The Gypsy Foruneteller (1594 – 1695). Realism for the Cause of Future Revolution. 1984 in Bodies of Work. 2006. London: Serpent’s Tail. (21)
“Is this going to hurt you?” [4]
Him not wanting me me reading Kathy Acker later me lying next to him him not looking at me both of us reading with the lights on feels exactly like the opposite of the nothingness I’m looking for. He says you can masturbate if you want: reading a copy of a lovers discourse they stole from Foyle’s on the South Bank after he tells me that his mother used to skate under that bridge where they are planning on relocating the skaters because it is dead space and they want another coffee shop and I say you never talk about your mother and he says no I don’t that’s what my therapist says but I stole her leather dress from my parents attic last time I visited them in the countryside.
[4] Kathy Acker. 2002 (by the estate of Kathy Acker). Rip off Red, Girl Detective. Grove Press: New York. (33).
Later when we do fuck we stare at each other for minutehours and I am about to leave because I realize you don’t want me and you say please don’t leave and there is a catch in your voice, a crack and the crack in your voice opens up to the void and I slip inside like my fingers slip inside you and like you your cock slips inside me and I finally feel you without between us and we stared at each other for so long that I am scared to move and our foreheads are touching this whole time and you breathe in as I breathe out like Marina Abramovic and Ulay in that piece[5] except that Ulay got the translator pregnant when they were doing their walk the Lover’s Walk[6] they left and I cant move because there is nothing left of me and we are perpetually inside each other.
In the morning I wake him up with a blowjob because I want things to be ordinary and later he says I’m just really scared and self-conscious about what just happened.
And of course I leave, in tact.
[5] Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Breathing in, Breathing out performance, 19 minutes long at the Studentski Kulturni Centar, Belgrade, April 23 1977
[6] In The Artist is Present. (2012. Dir. Matthew Ackers, Jeff Dupre) we learn that long-time lovers and collaborators Marina Abramovic and Ulay split up because Ulay got the Chinese translator pregnant while performing their piece The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk in 1988. This performance consisted of the couple walking from different parts of The Great Wall of China so as to meet in the middle. After the piece they did not meet again for 23 years.
The last night together he comes to find me standing on the pavement after being sick everywhere on the outside insides everywhere weeping I don’t know where I am I have disappeared I am having a panic attack, he tells me. I would tell him I know for fucks sakes, but there is nothing left to reply. I am stuck inside that other ending. Stuck I tell him when I can speak again that it was Renzo Martens and I just went to see an artist’s talk and he is starting a five year gentrification plan in the Congo and he JUST DOESN’T GET IT and he can never understand what it means maybe to be really invested in working on the continent and he doesn’t know how it ends he doesn’t know how five men take knives to your throat you on the floor tied up how you were so scared of being colonial how this death will swallow you over and over again. You tell him that you hate yourself for wanting Renzo Martens to be murdered by a Congolese worker on the old Unilever plantation and I swallow and sob and Renzo martens thinks he has gotten rid of aboutness and maybe he has but his medium is cruelty and I am so so so sick.
I drop the copy of Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia I am carrying and they will put it in their bag and the next day I will have to go back to their boat to get it and I will walk across the walkway and it is swaying and I will realize that I don’t get seasick anymore and then it hails even though it is meant to be fucking summer and so I have to hide in your boat and it is so strange that the Thames has tides even though it isn’t real
They tell me there were a few moments of non-relation (which he calls ‘unguardedness’) which I call togetherness and she calls a snake eating its own head and since that moment he has become frigid petrified incapable of loving anyone else unsure: I just don’t think I can lose myself that way, he says.
This is what Kathy Acker wrote about David with the Head of Goliath (1609 -1610):
The boy’s left hand is holding the second figure - a cut off head. Since it’s cut off, the young boy has just cut it off even though he’s looking at it sadly. Since the part of the boy’s body which is closest to me is his left hand and the cut-off head is even nearer to me, the boy, though he’s not looking at me, is displaying the head to me. A description can’t be that which it is describing. This is one of languages’ presumptions. Formally, here, Caravaggio’s describing or showing. Such description’s the opposite of fucking or connecting. As the head’s cut off, relations in the world are cut off: the young boy looks at he who doesn’t and can’t look back at him; I can look at only what I’m shown. Sexuality, disconnected.
[…] Realism: Caravaggio simultaneously shows me this and makes me/my perceptual mode be this; (since the cut-off head isn’t looking at me but downward and into himself, I’m not being desired: I’m cut off from the sexuality I see). I’m being totally denied. I scream. I live in this world.
The beautiful boy, looking at his own sexuality, has to turn his sexuality or himself into frigidity or an image. The sexual is the political realm. There’s no engagement.[7]
[7] Kathy Acker. 1984. Realism for the Cause of Future Revolution in Bodies of Work. (25)