While I’m not a big celebrator of holidays, I do believe in the firmness of ends and beginnings: the simple eternity of numbers and calendars, industrial time, even. It is a certain devotion to a “to the ends of the earth” sort of state of mind; the cleanness of an overcast, blank slate of a day, of a photograph of the Salk Institute.
James Welling, The Salk Institute (2015 / 2021)
This singular devotion to a plane beyond time — the romantic home of all sciences of wildly varying scales, in my stereotype-prone brain — holds the same charm as the act of declaring favorite things: the power in defining, claiming preferences that resonate throughout a life. (How rare it is, to hold something close unflinchingly all these years!)
I’d been watching FKA twigs music videos during my semiautonomous collection phase of online comment section musings, and remembered (during my first viewing of Eusexua) how breathtaking her music videos are. After another lovely return to “Two Weeks”, “home with you”, and, devastatingly, “Cellophane”, there is a general sense of bare life in her music that I want to consider more closely.
To be more precise, I call on bare life not in reference to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of homo sacer, but rather as a much looser reference to the emotions, passions, and drives that we may characterize as being undeniably “human” in some sense. The ways of being that distinguish the human from the animal and the divine.
Agamben’s Homo Sacer is open to the side, though, and I feel that it is probably relevant nevertheless... this admission of ignorance is pretty immature.Someone (one ellerose7854) in the comments of twigs’s “HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED EUSEXUA?” put it well (emphasis mine) —
Eusexua is what I feel watching any FKA Twigs music video. That feeling of surprise, awe, excitement, magnetism, mesmerized, an opening. The sheer thrill of watching something beautifully creative being executed with an almost incomprehensible level of skill, passion, and attention to detail. Being blown away, and being delighted and sometimes a little freaked out by that feeling. FKA Twigs music videos are stories told by an angel from another galaxy, full of gods we’ve never met. Pure, exciting, beautiful, disturbing, creative, alien, inspiring, vital ART.
and hugh__honey on Reddit (again, annotations my own) —
There was something about the elegance, the edge, the vulnerability, the confidence, the sensuality, the abstractness... honestly I’m not exaggerating when I say that her music helped me grow into who I am today. And I like who I am today. [...] the theme that I think she’s getting at here with “eusexua” is one I’ve thought about a lot. I think she’s describing the unique type of awe that we feel when we feel spiritually, physically, and sensually in sync with our own selves and with the people around us. It’s a psychedelic kind of feeling. Oceanic oneness. Collective effervescence. I dabble in psychedelics and I think about this kind of thing often.
It resonates with Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic (you know the drill by now) —
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible...
I think over the past couple years I’ve been trying to define this for myself, whether it be through the framework of image-text relationships or encounters with interfaces that draw you in, make themselves alluring dwellings. The desire to reach back through grains of human cultures, to gently cup the spine of a book (and how books feel like an offering, open hands!), to cut out, scrapbook, frame, gather phrases that outline the fuzziness of feeling in a commonplace book for a commonplace self.
I’m reminded of what Mad wrote of 0:
0 is how my life starts over and over again every single moment. its how i have the curiosity to greet myself like a stranger, to remind myself of my own name and age, little facts that make me me, little facts that make me new
Part of me wonders, when was the last time (if there ever has been) I felt so taken in by my own being? To offer myself the respect, “like i belonged/to me”?
So praise also the calm and quiet house. Praise also the most mundane affections. How the body can be satisfied to lie pinned beneath the ceiling of the sky.
So often when someone tells me that I should just love myself, it sounds more like they would like me to let them love me the way they want to. But the animal of my body wont come for anyone but me — but me who feeds it, who bathes it in the river, who lays us down beneath the skin of stars, and what is that but loyalty? But undivided love.
Cameron Awkward-Rich, “A Prude’s Manifesto”
Let me regard respect, then, as a focus this year. As I asked some time ago, what does it mean to truly respect myself? And what does it mean for me to respect others?
A.N. Originally written in and for my website, with custom formatting that you can view here.