The Door Ajar

There is a piece of music I love, called ‘Heart Asks Pleasure First’ from Jane Campion’s film The Piano. It is a blustery, intense piece, dense with desire. But it is the title that interests me even more. Heart asks pleasure first. What is the heart asking? Is the heart asking pleasure for something? Is it asking a favor? Is it asking for mercy, is it asking for more? Is the heart pleading for sweet release from unknowing, from knowing of not knowing what it is that it knows? And what is in the asking? Is it questioning, a quest for something, a journey to the heart of pleasure? A quest for an answer, hopeless, as if the heart would already know that pleasure cannot be fought, cannot be won? Is there an answer in pleasure? Or is there pleasure in asking, a quest, an unrequited continuum, a journey? Is the heart asking pleasure first, asking for her heart’s desire? What does pleasure want, I ask? Does she answer? Can she answer? If a pleasure in her innermost secret self, a jouissance, is beyond language, how, I ask, would she answer this asking?

The pleasure knows that in answering intentionally, we can only possess what we can hold – in the palm of the hand, in the field of vision, in the limits of language. In releasing the desire to possess, the pleasure of the space that unfolds resonates in more than we reach to grasp. When we seek an answer, we don’t always arrive at knowledge, only crumbs of facts, information. Knowledge, when allowed to unfold, does not always provide answers, an idea that can be expressed in words cannot be an infinite idea. But an idea that unfolds without force can reverberate, open up more space, a question remains unanswered in the opening up, in the lifting of the veil, in the bowing to the mists.

The soft earth swallows me, the sky welcomes my dissolving. Standing at the threshold, I am opening, I am eviscerated, I give and I take from the riches of the space that attaches to me and carries my trembling skin on the wind that comes form the sea. This space gives flight to my disassembled bits, chunks of me that plunge into thick air, sprinkled with crimson, washed in aquamarine, stood in veridian. Weightless, unseen, I touch myself, my eyes, my neck, my shoulder, soft skin behind my knee; invisible, I still present somewhat of a whole, I beckon to the flickering light and dissolve, liquid, drench this soil with scattered droplets of shiny wetness. And leaves cling to it, soft petals of my skin, blown by the wind, become unsettled.

The presencing is in the future and for now I linger with slow motion of fragile, yielding softness.

And the soil I stand on gives in to the weight of my body, it delivers me to a liquid landscape, undeniably ongoing, fluid, softly rupturing the temporal borders and boundaries of matter. Perhaps it is the heat that scorches my skin, seeking to merge into the air around me. I will not defend my walls, I will open all bridges, I am on all crossroads at the same time, make all my mistakes and all my victories, write my half awake philosophies of the early morning hour. I draw lines, not bridges. I monumate. And I leap into the future. Unframed. The  door ajar, I go avant-garde, unguarded, veiled from the gaze of the predictable, I seek the indefinable, the uncertain, unknown yet possible. Irrevocable breath, inevitable leap, dazzling burst of doors, shattering of windows, sudden infusion.

Adorned by the moment’s plenitude, I will open myself to the copious profusion, replete with roundness, saturated, tumescent, voluptuous, widening, spreading to what awaits just beyond my skin, and beneath it, too. What awaits? My heart's pleasure.

Do not break this spell, my house is lit…