My secret boyfriend Jack's playing behind the white sheet which serves as a backdrop and Heather is pleased I'm letting her take pictures of my bush.
I remember a being a child, a preteen, at the public swimming pool. Women all around, they were so huge, boobs flopping. I changed in the bathroom wondering how those women could be SO NAKED. I get it now.
I became unselfconscious about nudity the same time I started loving fresh tomatoes.
Incense is burning and I'm smoking on a stool and can't seem to get enough smoke to obscure my face. We want a smoke shot. The cigarettes are slim. It's not my fault.
Heather is taking photographs of me nude and I ask myself, what is she taking pictures of?
Without my clothes, my self is still buried.
Where is my self?
Under the flesh, muscle, is it in the bones? In my brain? My heart? She is not taking pictures of me, she is taking pictures of my epidermal.
"Why does one ask, 'where does the flesh meet the ether?" Cazo said at his art opening at Velvet months ago. Things are so obvious to him.
Before, before, I am trying to get everyone to rapture with me. I even sent out a facebook invite. This idea spawned by reading a few Douglas Coupland books back to back with a similar sentiment. It is page (3) in Player One, the chapter CUE THE FLAMING ZEPPLIN. Karen is in an airplane musing about the book/movie the Langoliers by Stephen King where a bunch of people suddenly vanish, their clothes and earrings and walkmans and headphones left abandoned where their bodies once took shape. There are some people who wake up to this (something about the pressure). Karen muses, "What does it mean for someone to vanish?" Namely, what is US and what is NOT US.
Ok, wait. So. The Rapture. Let me explain. In it's most simplistic sense the Rapture is the end of the world. In theory the good will rise to heaven, leaving their earthy possessions behind. The bad will stay on earth. A blaze of glory. Floating to heaven. Eyes skyward. Trumpets. A sweet photography project.
The rapture project didn't work out. It was supposed to be a series of photograph shoots. I would take a series of THREE photographs for every person. Locations were random. Wherever you happened to be when the rapture would take place.
FIRST PHOTO: Person, full body, looking skyward. SECOND PHOTO: Same frame, person gone, pile of what is "not of the self" left on a pile on the ground. THIRD PHOTO: Detailed perspective of "not of the self" stuff.
I wanted to make a prototype so I took set up a stool with my camera on it, put it on timer mode and took a picture of me looking at the sky.
Second photo: I took all of my clothes, shoes and hair things and put them together in a way where it looked like my body had just disappeared. Then I realized, wait, wait. I had are that morning and hadn't fully digested my food, so it wasn't part of my body yet. So I placed a cup of maté, some chewed up tortilla chips and my nutritional supplements and set them by my clothes. These things were not me. Then, wait, wait, my fillings, they are not me either. I took slivers of tin foil to replicate fillings and placed them besides my clothes. What about my dead skin? That is no longer apart me.
And staring at all these things and then thinking about what else I needed to include, I realized that my whole body was not me.
I was made up of the food I had eaten and the water I drank and the air I breathe. It wasn't just these things that supported my life, they literally were a part of me. My bones and blood and everything was just things I had consumed my entire life and the combination of those things, constructed by some divine intelligence made who I was. And I then I realized, I'm not separate from these things. I am, all these things.
If the rapture were to come, I would not rise. I am this earth. I am heavy. I am the universe.
I am one with the universe.
It's not nirvana. It's reality.
I couldn't go any further with my rapture project. It just got to complicated. It was too absurd to try and make an art bit out of a silly myth. It wasn't worth it.
So, what the hell is Heather taking a picture of?
Me? Or the Universe?
Heather said she owed me one for coming over on short notice and I told her this wasn't true. But I asked her to take a picture of me like the one Nelson Algren took of Simone de Beauvoir, doing her hair in the bathroom in heels. Wasn't the same. I'll try again in my forties.
Heather's so cool.
When the questions were asked
a deep breath was taken
creating space
for the answers
& slowly in clues & omens they came
The Universe answers
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