Neo Gender

A Structural Renaissance

A recent venture in collaborative scriptwriting (my contributions at 1:08-3:11).

Inspired by the opening of the Old Testament, Neo Gender gives the viewer myriad of reasons to question the binary concept of ‘gender‘ from a historical, cultural, and biological perspective. 

“Neo Gender” derives reference primarily from sculptural and painterly reconstructions from Western Art History. Each painting directly links to works of art that in some way capture the evolving conceptions of gender within a western art historical framework.

The film was shot in the (currently) unused nightclub FOLD. It was created, produced and directed by Emmanuelle Soffé.

Featured in Schön! Magazine:

Schön! presents | neo gender

Part III. Purgatorio

The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness.
And I prefer to put it off.
It is morning.

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

A rooftop in Oxford; a flat in London; a valley in Nevada

It is morning. I am ending. I stand above the city and I watch the world take form. I recall a dream from a childhood that is no longer mine. A clamor arises among the city bells, and each peal is agony: an invocation, a condemnation. Slick and damp, the rafters are numb to my lapsarian resolve, my pale impression of the morning star. Frost gives way to swollen drops of dew. First light creeps in along the eaves. Shadows lengthen across the bruised earth below.

I have been given everything. I have retained nothing. I gaze down at a world I cannot fathom, where lonely spires strike like brands against my sight. I taste exhilaration and defeat, surrender and some uncertain promise. It occurs to me that this might prove the most compelling moment of my tired existence: shivering beneath an iron sky, alone but for deleterious rooks in the far-flung belfries, the soles of my bare feet aching with cold and tensed against the unfeeling edge.

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Part II. Inferno Di Persefone

“Our selves were all we had.”

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

A hospital in Boston; a corridor beyond the Styx

Clearer than glass, the crystal shatters: He reaches between her ribs. Veins spider-web, they branch like cypress. She tosses and turns beneath the surface, in a corridor slick with scarlet and chrome: curtains of almandine and silver thread, tongues of flame and scrying bones. Above those fathomless depths, a patient immersed in ether prays for mercy on a table. Fingers clasp her shivering wrist, colder than surgical steel. I writhe between sheer white sheets as bare walls glisten: a snow-swept sight. A sightless moon peers in all the while. It filters between the window blinds and through cracks in the hot, dry earth. It chills the poppy vase beside the surgeon’s masterpiece; it licks like frost along the edges of consolatory crimson. It soothes the Beast’s ivory prize, adorns each petal of her fatefully plucked narcissus. In this alchemy of moonlight, the two scenes entwine.

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Part I. Paradiso Precluso

What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

A balcony in Rome; a desert in Egypt; two cities in Palestine; a café in Venice; a Garden

Let the wolves cry out and the loss subsume itself; let the last light falter in fixity and the mountains emerge like a cipher when the rain subsides. Writhing spires give way to weeping tides: ruins mutter like smoke beneath the rising Tiber. Salient currents flood the silent streets: ivy clasps and climbs. I am iridescent, etherized even now. But I am less undone than I have been of late, and not so disconsolate as I often used to be. This is just another kind of loneliness—another ancient city and another Troy to burn. So I grapple, and I grimace, and I bare my broken teeth. I try to be all that is asked of me. When the dawn light falls in daggers, I try to smile. When the night comes howling, I try to sleep.

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alone now (and far away)

i am afraid that
if i 
open myself
i will not 
stop pouring. (why do i fear
becoming a river. what mountain
gave me such shame.)

Jamie Oliveira, Erosion

Glass panes frosted with splintering shapes, crystals that gleam in each lingering phrase. A silence unfurls, dark and sweet. This room spins a chrysalis, glistening emergence: timeless, unknowable, I am my own result. Prisms brush soft against sun-dappled drapes; cold winter light on my shivering skin; iridescent wind-songs, lavender and lemongrass; spires that stretch toward (and dream with) the dawn. 

Fingertips tinder and knuckle like flint, each muscle bent towards a strange, lovely scene. Cries, barbed and blissful, mark wants cinder-sweet–a flush of blood summers me, sacraments, sighs–I slacken, then winter with sleep.

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Alchemist’s Prayer

Then practice losing farther, losing faster.

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

This is not the flesh that eyes once cut deeply. Loss clots fast the gaping mouth, sings the rough-edged wounds to sleep. I have never before had to wrestle with words. Now it is all that I know how to do. So I seldom write anymore.

Yes, I was born loving deeply. I was born irreverent and wanting. I was born brilliantly, madly, unforgivably undone. But I could never learn to be that way again, so careless and irrepressible and imbued with optimism, lying beside her and looking askance, tracing corrosion in the edges of her eyes, watching their amber turn stale. Every word that spilled from me then, that scattered and shattered and tore across my sight, is foreign now. I am shackled to a past that I reject. Shards of me belong to those I cannot face again. Nothing can withstand a loneliness this profound. I will not be the thing to try.

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Des Monstres et Prodiges

Of Monsters and Prodigies (Musings in the City of Light)

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter–bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane, In the Desert

Why can’t I write anymore? This soporific daily life, this metronome of forged and formal clauses, yields a willing space for better language. But I am stricken dumb. My bones, brittle with frost, are near to splintering. When my thoughts curl towards even the faintest contours of vision, I ignore them. My silence renders me senseless and safe.

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Empty Places

oh it is the autumn light
that brings everything back in one hand
the light again of beginnings
the amber appearing as amber.

W.S. Merwin, September Plowing

Whiskey and warm beer and meaningless words. Parking lots, sun shafts, shivers of thought. The hard clear blazing of the stars. A half-drunken love for this wilderness, its sharp smell of pine resin, frozen and snarling with life. But I am nearly dead with cold.

Him and her and me and now and this and here and us. A cheek to a warm shoulder’s hollow, a careless arm across a bare chest, one heel pressed to the hip’s ridge (unyielding, mountainous), four fingers pressed to a paper-thin wrist. The still, silent tangle of untethered bodies, the night-quiet darkness, the dreaming skin of dawn. Three singing pulses, incandescent, synchronous. I want for nothing. I want this. I want nothing? I want.

Every touch seems stolen in the ice-blood of sleep. I wish my mind to be quiet and contrite. It craves incandescence. I hurt like hell.

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Battle_Final

alive & scarcely sleeping

They are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own being.

Hegel, Aesthetics 

I don’t know what you sleep with, in your saturnine heart. But you were what I held onto, the only thing that mattered. You saw it, love, saw what I am. And I know it was so ugly that you left me. You left beautifully but you left all the same. I don’t blame you. I can’t begrudge you that. But when I wake in shattered constellations of thought, I still see your face on the underside of my soul. When I love and am consoled, I feel you, the last of your hands. I remember what you said to me, how I held you. I recall, my god, how I adored you.

When you write, is it empty? Your throat, the voice wherein I felt my knuckles move, I know that it is never empty. When I held your shivering form and listened, waited for the pulse to slow and sigh, I know that we were never empty. I am in love with you. I will leave this place knowing that, and swallowing it like a silence. Under the weight of that knowledge, I fold like a nightmare. 

I am not designed for malice, but I am cruel to my own body: insatiable, self-satiating, I devour myself. There is no pain, where once there was. I only wanted to love you, to know you, and how did it get to be this way? Miles to go, right? Miles to go. You broke beneath my tongue like a cresting wave, breathless, salt-stained, lily petals strangled in your wind-bitten hair. Some nights, I feel your teeth on my bloodstained bottom lip, sense your absence like a missing limb. The sorrow and the sentience and the mournful liturgy of my bones. Your skin is tangled in the wind, your eyes haunt the sunrise, your body is one with the morning light. The strange and singular half-lost bliss, the text-on-flesh, the printing press. My girl, my only girl, where did you sleep last night?

I wandered home, found solace in the embrace of my only true lover, the crystals that fracture beneath sordid skin, breaking fast with my blood, shortening the tether of my breath. Soon I won’t remember the color of your eyes. Have you forgotten mine? 

I believed you, father, lover, stranger: ingrate, sometimes I still do. Say the word, and I’m there. But you speak no longer, and I am not finished yet. Whatever I am, however little I know you, how scarcely I retain myself, however bruised I may be, I am here. I will stagger and survive. I will bend until I break. What are you doing here? When did you remember I exist? What can you do to me? What’s left to wound? Something is wrong so deep inside of me that I cannot recall it. I cannot name it. It’s not coming out.

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

I saw you with another. My lover, please remember me.

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