The Feeling

You Know The Feeling. Wading In It.

Last week I went to a documentary showing of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about the photographer Nan Goldin. Honestly I didn’t know anything about her before, but my friend gave me a ticket and I wasn’t about to turn down a free art cinema experience. The film alternates between chronicling Nan’s emergence into the art world in the 1970s from a biographical lens and her recent work as an activist protesting the Sackler family’s orchestration of the opioid crisis. Showcasing her groundbreaking diaristic photography throughout, time is presented as asynchronous and transient. The viewer jumps through events out of order and pieces together how the patterns of loss, addiction, audacity, and connection that unfold throughout her life inform her art and politics.

The photos excerpted from her slideshow titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency completely floored me. Something about how the people photographed can see me as much as I see them, how their touching and bruising and pain and pleasure and longing feels so much like a shared thing, how even the colors feel close and personal. She had a hard upbringing, very hard, the epitome of repressive suburban dysfunction. Nan's photographs spell out an obsession with intimacy, the highs and lows and in between moments. Her friends were her family, and her family was queer and raucous and thrill seeking and largely unseen by the mainstream culture before her documentation of them.

A few photos from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1979–1986

Most of Nan’s friends and muses died of AIDS or overdose in the eighties and nineties. A whole generation of queer people, wiped out by medical moralizing and legislative negligence. This legacy is particularly echoey in our present moment. Moral panic plus wealth and power for it's own sake tends to have the effect of cannibalizing subcultures and preying on pain.

That transcendence of self that can happen through devotion or sex or drugs or dancing is all the more alluring to those who have never felt safe in their bodies to begin with. People who are brought up without certain kinds of closeness will always grasp for it in their own special ways depending on their preferred genre of neurosis. How quickly fascination can turn to repulsion, something beautiful to something deadly, what does it take to tip the scales? What is that Feeling, like falling, or drowning? I wonder if it is worse to avoid the intensity altogether or lose yourself to it, or to wobble somewhere in the middle, dipping fingers and toes into the tepid waters of each and saying okay that's enough for me, thanks! My instinct is to say that austerity and indulgence should both be experienced in their entirety in order to be moved by either one, and in order to understand the other. Might as well commit, right? It's much easier treading the waters of past selves from the safety of the middle, but then there’s the boredom to contend with. Every personal choice comes with its own personalized ruin.

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I was too busy being busy to notice how everything around me was crumbling into salt crystals, crunching under my steps and embedding themselves in the soles of my feet. They will stay there, I'll take them with me everywhere I go. Sometimes it hurts to walk but it's the kind of sting that reminds me of nice times, the kind of pain that rises to the surface and shimmers on my skin, leaving me rosy and bright-eyed.

I have that condition where cold makes the blood vessels constrict in my fingers and toes, leaving them dead looking and pasty yellow. My broken space heater smells like something burning and the hot chocolate and kahlua inside me feels it too. I try not to let the changing temperatures get me down, even when The Feeling is like hide stretched across a drum, pulled taut across time and space, nothing inside but a great hollowness. I am more liquid as of late, the blood that shies away from my extremities and huddles into the warmth of the center. I am not pulled so much as poured. Holy wine, so bitter and so sweet.

I'll admit that things have gotten weird lately in terms of mind-body discombobulation. All kinds of immune system responses creeping up on me and choking me out, spiritually. You can reframe everything if you try hard enough, like it was all meant to happen this way, and it's always sort of true, but it never seems to matter in the moment. I'm not so afraid of The Feeling anymore because I've realized I'll never be able to rationalize or therapize or meditate or medicate my way around it, and I could either let that information condemn me to an life of looking for walls to put my head through or I could just do something else.

Like every day for 3 months I wrote slightly modified versions of the same letter addressed to names that decorate the sides of buildings in my city. Copy, paste, mail merge, edit, print, get signatures, print envelopes now, stamp, seal, post, rinse, repeat. The restoration of Monet's waterlilies, brought to you by Bank of America. Did you know that Monet and the impressionists were obsessed with Japanese prints from the pleasure district in Tokyo? They took inspiration from the landscapes, the triptychs. Worlds float, bubbles pop. It's painstaking work to remove the varnish.

Last night I followed The Feeling down, invisible tension like a tightly wound fishing line. A thickness of the tongue that spreads to wire the jaw shut in a tetanus inspired clench, wraps around the trachea, pools in the chest cavity and hardens heavy like cement. There is a valley where it all stays the same, where falling is like choking is like being perfect and young and petrified. The sun is going down on the weekend and I am Feeling like dead weight again. There are a few dreams of mine that have reached their logical conclusions. I am supposed to find new ones now.

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Arpeggios of Diamonds and Rust plinking through my headphones like freezing rain as the bus crosses the bridge over the river. People wearing long coats and carrying brown paper bags. The wave of festive unreality before the tide pulls back.

Days are running into each other again, time behaving strangely. Thinking a lot about the liminal times when the objective is just moving through space. Hundreds of walks, making coffee in the mornings, planes, trains, automobiles. The times when it's truly pointless to force the minutes to be one way or another.

I will promenade down the self help section of my local independent bookstore like it's a humiliation ritual, holding my own fingers lightly with a subtle caress, the tops of my cheeks going hot without knowing why. If the condescending covers will make me laugh or cry really depends on the day. It's not 2021 anymore so it's all gonna end up fine. Maybe a gift to be unable to feel so intensely.

Sometimes I look at the author photos on the back flap of the dust jackets of new and recommended novels, the ones they put on well lit STAFF PICKS displays. They are young and hot and have MFAs from east coast schools and write about sex parties and they are blurbed with things like "startling prose" and "an erotic tour de force" and I am rocked by the notion that my entire life has been a huge waste of time. Then I go home and continue keeping myself alive. A lot of people do this.

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Flipping the script can cause vertigo. Tell your doctor if you experience any of these side effects, which may be permanent.

I think I want to talk about the sad things, but I also want to keep them just for me. I think I want to be in love, but I also want to keep it just for me. I think I want to be seen, but only in disguise. The Feeling skips and stutters, incohesive, uninterpretable, like knowing you're about to wake up, like knowing that my pain is your gain, like the porous membrane between generosity and abandonment, like sacrifice. Call it fascism, call it human nature, call it carnage, call it a sunny day. No one ever knew what they were talking about anyway.