Prefix – Poly

A love letter to Nabakov

I like to hold it up to my nose, pressing myself into its spine so I can smell the stench of the black ink impregnated within its pulped pages. A shiny surface, indented and scratched with the passage of time, its pink tinged edges curled up exposing yellowed pages underneath the imperfect semi-gloss off-white exterior. It fans out, bulky from all the corners I have turned over in my fervent study of its intricate workings. I like to hold it in my hands and touch it, smooth my skin over its form, its wrinkled spine tells of my enjoyment.

Obsessed – possessed. Whose possession have I crept into? Does Nabakov’s intention lend itself to my cause? Was it written with my devouration in mind? I am a reader. I am a writer. Trash, porno, high, low-brow culture, a vulture of the ordinary kind, whose eyes narrow in sight of their prey. I am a lover of Lolita, her soft russet tangled orchard a mist of adoration in my mind, I am Humbert Humbert as he slyly encases her honeyed legs in his torrid embrace.

I am horribly, miserably in love. As the sorry tale comes to its conclusion I am in the deepest pit of despair. It is an intoxicating dream, where the pleasures of my morality jangle, and I become lost within the incandescent enchantments of the supposed conventions of immorality, carried along in Nabakovian turns of phrase. Its beautiful grotesquerie an illicit impediment to my elocution.

It poses some interesting questions, and puts the reader in an unusual position. That of the paedophile with the beast of desire at his back. You are enchanted with Lolita, she is beautiful, delicious, edible. You have disdain for Quilty. Humbert Humbert whose words have crept in your mind, spreading like cobwebs, catching their juicy prey within its delicate tendrils.

Is Lolita a glorification of paedophilic desire? I do not think so. Even as you become romanced by familiar Hum, Humbug, Humbert the Humbert, by his stoic witticism, his gentle words, his graceful beauty, his pitiful command of his beastly desire, you are also privy to his monstrosity, his enveloping brutish paws, his mauling of innocence, his desecration, his complete disregard for Lolita, she is but an object of desire, loved and adored, and preened and pampered. But really only loved for her pubescent beauty, Humbert spoke often of her maturing ripeness, of the time when nyphancy would no longer be in her possession, when she would become buxom and fleshy, swollen with femininity. He talks of his pretence of ignorance at her despair, her dismay. Lolita, only a child, and yet he continues.

I want to read it over, and over. Like a story that never ends, why my fascination? I do not lust after pubescent girlchilds, nor boychilds for that matter. But it is the sheer potency of his obsession with her that keeps me enthralled, the wonderfully spun words of unrequited desire. Because I think that is more what it is, than love. What is love? For his ‘love’ seems to possess an expiration, his lust would only last whilst she remained nymphetic, a mime of girlhood.

What is my obessession with girlhood? There was the awakening of desire, a strong urge to satisfy something inside, something that had no tangibility, but definitely a substancy about it.

Is it to do with my relationship to my father? The adoration that was mine for a short while, until the wings of womanhood swept me up and carried me helplessly along. I did regress for a while. Where did my father go? Do they retreat into retrospection, when the small swellings of nipple buds start to erupt, and you are no longer a ‘girl’. No longer his little princess, you are grown, all apelike, greasy and mawkish. Awkward and impolite, a retaliation against your loss? I still want to sit on daddy’s knee, to be drawn into his comforting embrace, but that job has now been relinquished to my lovers, are they daddy’s substitute? How does one break this pattern?

From a conversation I had yesterday, whilst I was knee-deep in panic about my love-lorn insecurities …I realised something about my detective character, or rather my desire to don the guise of man. It was something I used to make me feel safe when I was a child. If I was a man, I would no longer garner the same treatment my mother received from my father, although I liked to swing back and forth, in order to play the princess to the suburban fairytale. I think I also used it as a way to try to understand my father….I would look at the women with that same look he had in his eyes, penetrating…..I still seem to play out the roles throughout my life, mother, father, daughter. They interslice; female, male, female. I feel like Alice in drag scrambling fretfully through her wonderland of adult longing and male fantasy. The arsehole of the porn star, the rabbit warren of my imagination.

So I set myself the task of trying to summarize what it is my work is about, the core beliefs if you will. It feels like it’s always in a state of formulation, the beast just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

There exist several characters that weave throughout my practice, I imagine they are kind of like the multiple John Malkovich’s, in the film of the same name, myself again and again; in drag, pregnant with sexuality, fornicating within internal abscesses, a reverse birth canal of abject arseholes.

My main character the Detective; explores my fantasies of masculinity and of coming to terms with my own femininity. The only ‘male’ in the story, although his lack is substituted with a bulging cock-sock lest his true gender be displayed, and his apparent masculinity called into question. Girls swoon in his presence, he only has to adjust the curve of wadded material and they moisten in anticipation. He is the super stud of my pubescent dreams, with the swagger that I always wanted to possess. In a family unit of misogynistic males, the role of the subordinate female was not within the grasp of my desire. I wanted to be the pandered male. I only understood sex as a projection of male desire. I began to develop a kind of simulated hermaphroditism, where I could be at once both male and female, existing in a constant state of in-between. I did not feel as if I was born into the wrong gender per se, nor did I feel I wanted to become a boy. I was a girl, but the freedom of masculinity and its ideals seemed to appeal to me more than what I perceived as femaleness. As puberty encroached, and I [b]loomed toward womanhood, the balance began to shift as my interaction with the world as a ‘female desired by men’ took on shape. I no longer held the masculine gaze, I was in the male gaze, where men do the looking and women are looked at. Images to be consumed. The make-believe characters within my hyperbolic narrative explore this journey, trying to order and make sense of what is it is to be fe-male, or anything in-between.

It has been over a year since I left the safe confines of the institution, almost a year since I sailed across the sea to the port of Amsterdam. After finishing my MFA – two years of intensity, with four years prior – I longed for a distance that could only be found with an ocean between us. Four months in I was all a-crawl within the dark depths of the Northern Sea, calling out like a siren in the night. But without the safety of the institutional cage I floundered without a life-vest. Like Rapunzel in her modern high-rise, I would stare down at the world, waiting for something to come and wake me out of my stupor, or is that Sleeping Beauty? They both translate to the fable I had created. Alas no prince came. So I began to dream of familiar climes, and clicked my heels three times “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”. And so I was home, with all the Bisto™ gravy I could ask for. But then, as always happens when you get what you think you want, you suddenly don’t want it so much anymore. I felt like I had opted for the easy landing. I can climb that tower for myself. So back I clicked, and down that tower I slowly climbed. So here I am a year on. I left the high-rise for a brown-stone, and the institution for the atelier. I still canoe back and forth between familiarity and Amsterdamned, but without the itch (I know there’s cream for that).

Now for the real work to begin to make work outside of the coop. Pushing myself outside of the realms of comfort, I have begun to make work on the move, between continents, underneath the tented arch of bedcovers sheathed in torch-light, under the watchful eye of a fellow passenger. I always felt I needed ‘stuff’ to make work, a safe haven from which to create. But I have learnt I can carry it with me in that little place inside my head, I will admit the studio helps to consolidate your thoughts, and is successful in enveloping you within its world, and I would never give up my studio for all the tulips in Holland, but I am liberated by my new found ability to crawl into this inner recess and create. I think writing has helped, all these long journeys with notebook in hand, using any stop gap as an excuse to narrate. Also owing to the collaboration that has ensued between Richard Taylor http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/ and myself (Edinburgh – Amsterdam) that made viscous these perpendicular boundaries, where time and space have become a mutable blur in the landscape.

I think I’m in danger of taking my life for granted. I’ve been living in Amsterdam for three months now and I worry I’m becoming complacent about my surroundings. There is so much beauty around me, and yet it gets lost amongst the everyday existence, the to and fro-ing. I’m ashamed to say that recently I have only really left the house to go to work, otherwise I just seem to float about the apartment, lost in excerpts of text, I could be anywhere in this high rise. On my 40 minute bicycle ride from work tonight I had the opportunity to give myself a good talking to – I enjoy these cycle rides, (when it’s not raining!), it gives me a chance to really think, away from all the noise of the internet and social media that seems to eternally threaten to swallow me up whole. I see some beautiful sights in my to-ing and fro-ing; the light as it ripples across the water and kind of dances in its own radiance as I cycle past, the huge neon crane puncturing the darkness with its iridescent glow, the dogs with their flashing night-time collars always amuse me as they weave in and out of the park woodland panting after their master, the heron wadding through the lake, the duck-like creatures strolling side by side on the evening grass as I meet their curious gaze – I am going to savour these moments, because they will not be with me forever, as familiarity sets in and they become ordinary and their splendor will no longer touch me. I’ve been waiting for a sunny day, I promised myself that the next bright day I will treat myself to a tour around the city, or at least a cycle around the park, but every day since has been grey, and yet within the grey it was still beautiful when I finally ventured out today. So, perhaps I should stop blaming it on the weather, and get out of this bloody flat and explore this city! So, I have set a day for Saturday, I shall go and spend some time getting lost, cycling, visiting galleries for a few hours before work. I am actually rather fascinated by the tours that Amsterdam offers, I sometimes see a large group accumulate outside the shop that I work in on the cusp of the red light district, and I turn down the music and overhead heater so I can strain to become part of their group, I can hear the odd word from the guide telling them about the ladies of the night. I make a mental note to go on one of these tours, I want to learn the mechanics of a tour, how they work, what they say, where they go. I wonder how tours of the exact same area differ. You can even take a tour with a former prostitute as your guide from the Prostitute Information Centre in Amsterdam. One can also purchase a self-guided tour from the same centre. I definitely intend to do both of these tours with the intention of making some kind of exploration into what it is to be on a ‘tour’. Even tours around art galleries, I don’t think I have ever been on one, I did once have one of those audio guides when I walked around the van Gogh Museum, which I found a complete let down, I thought that it constantly talked you around the exhibition, set to someone else’s pace, and particular direction around a space, it would be as if you are someone else for a while, but instead you had to just select the corresponding number to a picture you stood in front of. I was sorely disappointed.

I think I like idea of being someone else for a moment, as if you are trying them on like a costume, perhaps that is what interests me about the idea of the’tour.’ Will this following, enable me to become a tourist, a visitor to a place in which I live, does it allow me a fresh pair of eyes from which complacency is safe?