The Rape of the Static

Photographs of myself, static moments captured by eclipses of time, moments of fabrication, holding the self, clutching to a nullified existence, unable to breath under the closed folds of claustrophobic space that surround a face no longer in relation to the other. Flesh bound to decay, plays itself off as immortal…eternal. The binding pulls of attraction and revulsion, the narrowness of my mirrored view finds no resting place in a heart torn by the dualist skew. It breaks the mirror into shattered moments, traps reflection in severed locations and begs masturbatory seduction, of the self on the self on the self… an infinite regress of perspectives on the self that is no one, that becomes the image I see, a self that adds ever subtler flavors of suffering to its own arousing delusion.

But static images are only a manifestation of static thoughts, a repercussion of our need to hold perspectives as substance. Fear is in abundance and leads us to continually play this game of self vs. mirror. This was why I repeated my own rape, the abusive infliction of objectification that I tried to use to break the static taste of this imagery. Break the object to find the subject, then rape the self to find the soul, one way to annihilate existence and open ourselves to ecstatic surrender, one way to blind ourselves so that we might perceive the beauty of God… I’m not saying that I recommend rape… nor would I recommend the flight to God as a form of good health. But it is God’s rape that every woman yearns for. The rape that undoes the image, the rape that forces submission of the static, the unconsented intrusion that tears open the strength sitting at the center of our most humiliating vulnerability.          

                                                                                                            -March 18, 2007