--- Sacredly Profane Muffling ---
‘Spirits possess and ride anybody.’ L.H. Stallings
Nonhuman entities make depository announcements in erotic spaces, till every surface swells into a singular, stretchy membrane. The (human) body becomes shared territory for a less timid information system that replaces all iterations of singularity. This augmenting relation forgoes the appearance of elegance (concealment) for the blabbing froth of collective emittance.
Desires of no end or beginning snatch various forms depending on the materials in reach - wood, fingers, waist, glass, toe, shadow, tap, mouth, bog, shoe, whisper. These desires are spirits with multiple and infinite origins, defying mortality through access and excess. They mediate every interplay, participating and collaborating on all ecstatic potentials. In Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, L.H Stallings’ reflects that ‘sex is so weighed down by human ethics that there is little to no simultaneous valuing of sex as art, performance, collaborative interaction between humans and nonhumans, and as a nonhuman force acting and being aesthetics beyond sight.’ Ecstasy disarms centrality, intimacy splinters the tactile edges of the body. The creative engagement of inorganic materials -- floorboards releasing ankles, a room caressing and entering you -- rescopes sex as always unprivate and extensively co-authored.
The unwanted and unseeable outcomes of intimate exchange bare the brunt of aesthetic regimens that render them disposable, embarrassing. Hilarious acts of composure ungratefully affirm the availability of wayward matter, canned laughter muffles the crude sounds of filthy work but can never suspend its metabolism. Other/outer-worlds exist within not only body fluids, breath and hot air but the desires of ancestors (related/unrelated) and the touchable/untouchable structures that map our geographies.
To engage in an active relationship with those desires, to attune to ‘aesthetics beyond sight’, means confronting the horror of being out of centre, out of control, fragile and eternally entangled in im/material networks that undermine, as Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing write in Horror in Architecture, ‘that beloved conceit, the sovereignty of the individual.’ A spurt or a splat immediately lands on a spot just cleaned. Saline liquid scabs over panties, pillows, tabletop. Waste’s textural temperaments often match the flexibility(+/-) of our collaborative yearnings - will you reinvigorate a crust with soap or spit? Is your preference for chores or flirtation?
Writer and scholar Mckenzie Wark tweeted about becoming pliable matter on the dancefloor, autonomy undone by the DJ, shattered by sonic circuitry. ‘On the physical side it’s dancing without self consciousness that one is dancing. Being danced. Opening the body, turning it over to the DJ.’ It’s baffling how at any club night, function, party (densely packed or not) everyone and everything is on you, you on everything, shadows are born like new bodies, some return with old bodies, tightly tethered to blurry outlines, not quite anyone’s possession, imprecise copies scaled too high or wide or small, with wild dispositions and terms of their own. ‘Being danced’... the silt of it can be found lodged deep under fingernails long after. And in that dirt is the vile and seductive cross-temporal mingling of multi-species craving, a complete cruising site. Scum and spirit’s memorializing of ecstasy is the softest of grips, with fingers spread for dripping - an archive soaked.
