Fake You Till You Make Me

You were vibrating, a subtle tingling across my palms, in waves, rippling through spaceYou are at first just a mere aproximation. A certain velocity of perception at first being a definite space, at last a body to caress. There were less of you where there was no one behind, but still, the things behind us created you also.Everywhere all at once, all as one. Not with words, disrupting union.You are like smoke, but gooey and heavy to hold.You are a blob, a friendly blob to sit with, to move with, to vibe with, to be in it. Nothing to hold on, nothing to fear.You are and you are not at the same time, you are translucent and you pierce bodies.there is no way of touching you with a hand, as you are. come as you are.enveloping the sound around you ... A A A beginning. A relation.how did you hear yourself? Which yourself?the field. Bum bum bum ! ! !you are present in the room with no walls and birds around and inside. you are a bird.wallbirdcollapsing. vacuum. you are purple patches of illumination. You a impossibly light, less than usual. So usual but unusual. It immobilizes me.I moved you but did not hold you. You are impossible to hold on to. You are always embracing me.how many embraces can embrace the embrace?

Anyone who finds themselves in public checking out someone they find cute knows the feeling of pulling your gaze away the moment you notice the other noticing you. I keep returning to this moment of just having broken contact, with my gaze hastily seeking refuge in the details of a handle, a stone, the sky—ideally not my phone. Sheltered by a lower stimulus following our exchange, I can easily catch traces of you I snatched. A detail of a hand, your clothes, the way you stand. Either under my skin, in my mind’s eye, or as gasoline afterimage accenting the shadows of my surroundings with the shape of your aspect. Your trace seems both viscous (lingering beyond) and vaporous (fleeting before). Tracing my attention, your trace attends the rest of me. We drip downwards with viscous weight and once fume upwards in vaporous flight, hiding in the grounded dark grey ground and glimmering afternoon sun. I never know if by looking away, I was being polite, have chickened out, or if precisely in this abandonment is where we could have begun flirting—not just with each other, but with the mischievous life-web of intimacy.

This text is about being in contact and then abandoning it to remain in contact. It’s about body scanning, breaking time, flirting, twitching, wounding, and being left on seen. It hopes to move through all these motions with a messy kind of kindness and a clumsy kind of trust—creeping along while trying not to be a total creep. Ultimately, this text is about acknowledging that we know very well how to love—but do we know how to dare to love?

you are a tissue connecting us through atoms of air and souds pouring into youYou are a familiar space, but connecting with you is scary since I may lose myselfyou were there sitting, touching, breathing, lost.You are something I had but lostx3.come back. Impossible.what will remain, what will be remembered?you were a body, covered, round, elevating and descending... small..puffy little hills, cloud like forms, smooth and lost...stop. you are a stop.i am...only dissolving

I work as an artist who guides audiences and participants through experiences, performances, and workshops. Like many of my colleagues, I often build my sessions from smaller exercises that invite people to play with imagination, attention, sense perception, and language. One of my go-to exercises is inspired by the work of Andrea Božič and Julia Willms of the platform TILT. In their choreographic-dramaturgical text Undoing What We Know, Božič and Willms introduce the concept of the field—a connecting organism that both inhabits space in fullness and is also space itself.^[1] Framed in their long-term research project Spectra, the field is at once a figment of attention, dream, and architecture—with the identity of the attendee, dreamer, and environment constantly shifting in a dance of quantum leaps.^[2] My guided encounter departs from TILT’s Field, taking it as a jumping-off point to invite a small group of participants for a close encounter of the third kind with an imaginary volatile matter that rests at their fingertips—if only they reach out to touch it. An excerpt from the guiding script:

Observe the sensations that come from touching. Describe these sensations to yourself! See what words come to mind. Let this touch be nothing but a touch. Simple, curious. If you are uncertain about how to touch, you can try different ways and see what feels right. Or you can explore how it is to stay with the uncertainty. See if you can put material qualities to your touch—as if in contact with an object, a tissue. You can make it as concrete as you want—add density, temperature, colour, responsiveness of material. Or you can let your touch unfold through vague, unsubstantial, and fleeting sensations. Ever-changing, subtly present. Much like a daydream.^[3]

After being in contact for some minutes, participants are asked to break their touch, with a snap of a finger, a clap, a shake, or any other motion that could signal an attempt at disconnecting. This disconnection is hard to achieve completely—participants often speak of traces, echoes still staying with them, often with their own material qualities akin to the matter they were in contact with. At times, participants cannot disconnect at all, as they feel completely engulfed, entangled. This can sound overwhelming, akin to being irreversibly contaminated by VanderMeer’s “Shimmer” in Annihilation, but to my surprise participants oftentimes feel a sense of responsibility towards what they perceive as a fragile and tender creature of sentient matter they are now given the opportunity to handle. Following a series of reconnections and disconnection, participants are finally invited to share their experience in a collective writing exercise we do through an online interface.^[4] Our prompt for writing is to describe our encounter by addressing who we touched in the second person: as “you”. We write a single stream of text with each participant’s voice highlighted in a different colour. Participants are actively encouraged to stay with the difficulty of verbalising their experience, deliberately interrupt any thought that could amount to a monologue, and freely supplement, invert, redact, and edit the voice of each other. The whole exercise from the start encounter to when participants finish writing takes about 45 minutes.

you are above, below, in front and behind, athickmembranejust starting to appearas if always present. I am learning to swim for the first time, to swim in a very special substance, cannt compare to other substances or other things that i know. I dipped my fingers into a crystaline stream. A piece of it became a leaf, a husk of a leaf, detaching itself and catching in theHair. It floated off like a nervous butterfly. Heat.Inner fire.A cool marble of air, rolling along the floor, then taking flight, escaping gravity.You are where we are, when we are.Pierce the buble of self-righteousness.Constant, eternal, all timespacematter. Fullness.I wish everyone knew you.Like me.You stay when we go.linger. we drag you with us.Leaving you is unfathomable.You are easier to connect with than to disconnect from, a piece, a whole.Stretching, bending, but never breaking.Heavy breathing.

If you’ve ever taken a movement class or tried guided meditation, you know that usually, you must first ground yourself in the moment by using your breath. Next, you’re most likely to address all parts of your body, or at the very least the ones that are in contact (with the floor, with an object of the exercise, with someone else). Commonly called a body scan, this exercise often starts with attending to one’s toes or feet and gradually moving up towards the top of the head.^[5] Breathing plays a big part here, keeping a sense of ground, giving tempo to a body in parallel attention—both attending to its sensations and keeping track of the ascension. When guided, body scans are simple and powerful examples of how a fluid attending between spoken language and sensory experience can give birth to a body that is both flesh and event.

In the Christian mystical tradition, we find a curious variation to the body scan. The Evangelical Pearl is an anonymous Dutch text written in 1537 probably by a female author and published in a larger volume in 1538. Chapter 14 features an exercise in which the devout’s soul is invited to climb up the parts of Christ’s body as if they were rungs on a ladder. Ladders are of course a common conduit for ascent in the mystical imaginary, but if we stay purely within Western spirituality, it is incredible how the language of The Pearl mirrors the guiding scores for somatic practices a few hundred years later:

We should first approach his feet, with which for thirty-three years he so humbly sought after us […] Next, let’s go to his knees, which for our sake he so often bent night and day before his heavenly Father […] After that, approach his holy body, which [was] so pitilessly treated by imprisonment […] Next to his loving heart, which was opened with love as wide as heaven so that we might dwell therein […] ^[6]

The text continues (amidst some unfortunate antisemitic zingers) to climb all the way up to Christ’s head only to then proceed to two more ladders in which we ascend along his “sorrowful soul” and “joyful spirit” respectively. Equally unfortunate is how neither Christ’s soul nor his spirit gets such a detailed bodily description as we saw with the first ladder. It is not specified for how long or how often one should partake in these exercises—if they should last only a few minutes or an afternoon, or are rather meant to be stretched over a lifelong spiritual journey.

Contemplative bodies like the one we find in The Pearl act not merely as signifiers for higher truths and virtues. It is true that all of Christ, including his body parts, are double-hinged to both human and divine natures, but it doesn’t mean one nature is necessarily below the other. Christ is both a person who suffered death just thirty-three years short of two millennia and a person who is eternally begotten, eternally dying on the cross, eternally resurrecting. Depending on which branch of Christianity you ask, contemplating the human body of Christ or participating in an event like the Eucharist means literally participating in the divine body of Christ and in the cataclysmic sacrifice of the Last Supper—a sacrifice that is eternally taking place, even as we speak. Likewise, when we contemplate Christ’s body, we contemplate our own body. Susan Ashbrook Harvey writes how in Christianity, “the body has ontologically locative significance across time and eternity. An essential and inextricable component of who we are, both here and in the world to come, it was also seen to be where we are, both now and in eternity. Bodily experience and bodily expression become primary epistemological tools in both realms of existence, as we seek relation to God; the knowledge they convey is a knowledge that cannot be gained in any other way. Therein lies the purpose of the body: it provides the context for how and what we can and will know of God, now and in the life to come.”^[7]

You exist in what we imagine you to be, but vanish when the noise eats you up.hard, I'd say impossible to disconnect fromthe luminous all-pervading field from where all emerges and de-compost.To some, you are sacred...To some, a monster, revealing too much of themselves.. holly shit.you grow out and in of our nostrils and in the holes on the white ceiling acoustic panelsyou extend infinetely out of the open window, into the blue sky, the atmosphere, as far as the surface of the closest stellar object, or as close as the closest moleculewhere do you begin being you?when you also dissolve into not being you anymoreyou have been there all the time, dissolving, reconstituting,fluxing. Everything, then nothing.You have a large mouth that can eat everythingbut still you stay hungry.gently craving

Somatic exercises like scanning the body, grounding oneself in one’s breath, or moving towards an imaginary middle point are common features of secular meditations and spiritual traditions that emphasize the lack of difference between the world and its bodies—from Zen Buddhist meditation to the Christian schools of centring prayer they inspired. I would like to call the exercises native to these practices as exercises in first-person somatics. These exercises share much in common with movement practices that favour interior attentiveness as their starting points, like Feldenkrais and Body-Mind Centering, First-person somatics starts out by connecting with a sense of “I”, in which we may remain resting or use it as a ground to venture out from.

Complimenting this, we find exercises in second-person somatics, which start with a point, a person, a body, a movement, an object that seemingly is outside of one’s boundaries. It is the somatics of “you”. Examples of this could be contemplative and devotional exercises, erotic encounters, or even the thing you’re doing right now: the act of reading is but an exercise in second-person somatics. It’s a strange feedback loop that pours the body out into text, only for the text to crawl back up into the body. By attending to the “you” that is the world, one lets themselves realise how their body is an answer to the question that is the world, and conversely allows the world to turn one’s own body into a question, waiting to be answered. In my experience, modern somatic practices are mostly meant for individual bodies, and as such the use of second-person perspectives is often reserved for teachers, guides, and therapists (the ones often leading a session, tasked with having to attend to the body of others). I would like to see more practices and exercises that invite the participants to experiment with second-person somatics —not just to open a creative field of exploration with a wide historical and cultural background in contemplative practices, but also to help develop a literacy towards a world that doesn’t yield to the myth of the individual.

Both first- and second-person somatics rely a lot on the help of mental and sensory images, amplified sensations, visualisation, speculation, and role-playing to provide tactile grips to the slippery hands of attention. These aids are often left behind eventually, but not because they are inferior to some Platonic ideals that rest superior to the senses. It is rather that with time, the technical edges of an exercise become saturated, giving space for a living trust between bodies that don’t need their training wheels anymore. If this process of grounding saturation in first-person somatics is “fake it till you make it”, then the feedback loop that is the motor of second-person somatics must surely be “fake you till you make me”.

You are a gentle breeze, no need to extend my hands to feel you, as the AC makes you wavy.Lingering, everlasting.you are quiet and slow, cold but warm, body without a body. an organ without organs.You are sitting there, floating above. Waving.You are body extending my body, borderlessly.you tingle, or is it my hand that does? Am I feeling you or myself?and caress the skin with coldness.how the palm should turn to feel your shape? you are annoying! elusive. but sticky. when i shake you off, you stick, when i try to touch you, you shy away.you are a velcro tape without the velcro tape soundi wonder who is now trying to address you with words. Is there a mediation to the immediate?and so it fits to anything.

The practice of orthodox Christianity is largely about participating in two anachronistic bodies: the Trinity generally and Christ particularly.^[8] Hinged with what is called a hypostatic union, both the three persons of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ (fully human, fully divine) pose a co-presence of bodies that inhabit very different mortalities and eternities. It would not be far-fetched to think that at the centre of the Christian cosmos are not so much the persons of the Trinity, but more the whirling hypostatic dance between them—what is often called Perichoresis. To put it differently, at the centre is not a personal body, but the body of a relationship. It is not a mere Biblical metaphor when St. John calls God love.^[9] Spiritual languages from the highly heretical text of Thunder Perfect Mind to the crystalline fragmentation of traditional Eastern Orthodox liturgical scripts still used today are all very good at holding onto this anachronistic body of love. Much like supplementary planes of space-time on Orthodox icons and cubist paintings, spiritual tongues can sequence the simultaneous blooming and dying of bodies almost at a stroboscopic speed.^[10] The fracturing of tenses, pronouns, and directions push, pull, and whirl the body of love, making it appear both as a chimeric aberration and a trinitarian dance. Likewise, participating in this dance will make a body go from a dancing body to becoming dance-incarnate—at once particular and plural, at once giving and receiving, at once changing and eternal.

T. Fleischmann gives an account of this body, which they experienced during a bus trip from one lover to the next.:

I sleep on the back seats and try not to think about peeing. As I am literally moving away from Simon, I do some visioning of what my next relationship will be (open in the ways Simon was unavailable; romantic; transsexual) and I cast intentions, projecting this openness toward the universe as a spectrum announces itself unto the heavens. I think of the love I have within myself and in thinking of it make it an offering to the many-handed hunger of transsexuality. I try to become aware of the movement of my body, which feigns stillness while crossing an earth that spins and arcs, and in that collapse of motion, I sense the impossible movement of love’s potential, an ecstatic spatiality. I become through this mediation more than myself, physical, and so I find a way to move directly through the possibility of Simon and into simple possibility. I drink Gatorade, many different Gatorades, over the long ride. When I reach the rural mountain holler where I used to live, I pee wildly beside a barn and fall asleep on a friend’s couch that smells of tobacco and the damp summer ahead.^[11]

How do you body scan an anachronistic body? If all words are bound to become flesh, then all “bodies are fictions created by the effects of language”.^[12] In the world of language, there is no such thing as a non-anachronistic body—speaking to the bodies of each other means speaking a wound into the wholeness of love. Conversely, the more we attend to each other, the more our bodies dissolve back into the body of love. Love language is the encounter of one’s own alterity, a sharing of spell-words that inter-carnate rather than incarnate. That is, the wound the body speaks is a sight of encounter out of which is born a being-of-relation. All wounds bear an apocalyptic quality as much as they are a violent disclosure (apocalypse from the Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις, meaning disclosure) of the alterity that gave birth to it. Likewise, the most apocalyptic language of all languages is the language of love poems. Every poem is a wound insofar as it “doesn't just reveal a personal presence; it reveals a transpersonal presence”.^[13]

You are a gentle breeze, no need to extend my hands to feel you, as the AC makes you wavy.Lingering, everlasting.you are quiet and slow, cold but warm, body without a body. an organ without organs.You are sitting there, floating above. Waving.You are body extending my body, borderlessly.you tingle, or is it my hand that does? Am I feeling you or myself?and caress the skin with coldness.how the palm should turn to feel your shape? you are annoying! elusive. but sticky. when i shake you off, you stick, when i try to touch you, you shy away.you are a velcro tape without the velcro tape soundi wonder who is now trying to address you with words. Is there a mediation to the immediate?and so it fits to anything.

I’d like us to return to the very start of this text: the moment of breaking a gaze when flirting, the moment of participants breaking touch in the guided exercise. These examples worked with a touch first established and later voluntarily abandoned. But what happens when in the midst of being caught up in one another, we suddenly lose contact? Or if our contact fails to meet our expectations? Earlier this year at Mystical Theology Network’s conference Mysticism and Action in Oxford, I got to hear Cole Arthur Riley of Black Liturgies fame give a keynote. In her talk, Cole confessed how God is “leaving her on seen”, for her entire life, never answering her prayers.[14] Instead of taking this as a problem, Cole used her experience to criticise latent norms in how we approach spiritual practices like prayer, liturgy, and contemplation. Colourful accounts of visions and encounters from mystics can lead one to expect that spiritual practice is all about chasing a sensory or mental high that somehow catapults one from the vaguely defined category of “the everyday” right into the arms of the divine. In light of these expectations, it is easy to feel bad when one’s encounter with the other is underwhelming, mildly interesting, or just not happening at all. We can be jealous of the mystic even if they went through the most torturous experience—at least they got something!

In contrast to this, Cole advocated a radical trust in the silence of God that goes beyond clinging to seemingly unreciprocated love, similar to co-dependency.^[15] What can be helpful here is wisdom from monastics, to whom prayer is more about showing up to a relationship day after day than about chasing exquisite encounters. Practicing coming to terms with radio silence is part and parcel of life-in-practice, from a Christian contemplative to a Zen roshi.^[16] What is often called the dark night of the Soul, being faced with silence, can also mean a problem in perception—that is, we are clinging to meet love at a certain distance, while it has moved deeper into us. It’s still in reach, we’re just holding onto our old ways of touching and thus meet only a void. This is not an invitation to ascend to higher Platonic spheres but rather an invitation to come closer to the wound. I often see this moment as love pulling her hand away from our contact the same way participants in my exercise pull their hands away from the touch they were just in. It first seems as rejection, but oftentimes it is but a tease to keep leaping forth to a place that no longer holds certainties as to what shape our love will take.

Spiritual and somatic practices have ways of tending to how their practitioners’ expectations are challenged over time, but this can’t be said about the art world, where my work mostly happens. Performances in a gallery, a festival, or a black box have little space to cultivate trusting relationships. With considerably shorter timeframes than long-term practices and institutional agendas, an art experience can often at best facilitate a direct transaction of experiences. This is at large odds with the ambitions of many artists and initiatives that wish to contribute to processes of unlearning, growth, and healing—things that play out in the long game and would require us to gradually surrender to “the opacity of the other and in ourselves”.^[17] It seems to me that a common flex at art events, movement workshops, and spiritual gatherings alike is to be the one most present, most affected, having the biggest points of catharsis, the most profound insight etc. A flex of presence, existence-deluxe. There is a myth that more connection (with our bodies, with others, with divinity) means better experiences, exercises, and better practices at large. But the truth is that the more we contemplate the body of our loved one, the more we begin to contemplate the body of love itself, which is bound to tear us apart.^[18] Our connection is bound to fracture because we, ourselves, are fracturing in the wake of any connection.

One thing to ask from our connections is whether we are ready to confront what maybe we’re not expecting, or are we simply fetching things to confirm our ideas about what connection is? Are we ready to be content with reaching out and feeling no one on the other end? I fear we get too caught up in the theatre of connection to notice a love that is already there—simple and obscure. If there’s any stillness in this love, it is rather a kind of twitchy stillness—a disillusionment through wounding. Anyone who experienced loss or grief can testify how amongst all its pain there is also an unexpected sobriety—a loss of expectations can bring the same. This might not be the rosy outcome one hoped for but, rather, an interruption that forces the body to halt and behold its bonds to the moment inter-carnate. It’s a spiritual experience, but not the kind one expects, with a choir of Seraphim, a stillness resting beatific radiance or a big fat smooch. The much-preached marital endgame of the spiritual union has no place here. Rather, what we may find is an act of “noble unfaith”, as Hadewijch would put it. This is more of a getting-together by a breaking up.^[19] Any practice that deals with love must submit to this negative approach. That is, we shouldn’t look for techniques to excite or acquire love, but instead we should work to become living confessions of her already-present nature, wherein “to lose one’s way in her is to touch her close at hand”.^[20] Abandoning our expectations of how love looks, smells, walks, and talks—voluntary or not, this abandonment is the very thing that allows us to dance, scan, and flirt with her many-wounded body. While never yielding to be fully recognized, we might find some of her wounds bearing a strange familiarity to ours.

can you hear me? can you feel me? can you read me. am i legible, intelligible. are you aware of how you fill me up, pin me down, flow through and around and dismember, decompress my form?so heavy, holding all of us up within you

Acknowledgements

This text was in part developed in the spring of 2024 at the ŠUM/ARIA/More-Than-Planet residency in Ljubljana with generous hospitality from Tjaša Pogačar, Brandon Rosenbluth, Uroš Veber and Rea Vogrinčic from Projekt Atol. Thank you Michelle Horsley for being a place of rest and escape during those days. Thank you to Andrea Božič and Julia Wills for their inspiring work with Spectra. Lastly, a very special thank you to all who participated in my workshop in Ljubljana. The highlighted text is from our afternoon’s encounter.