Love with both hands
Article by:
Alexander:
Hi Oriane, it is great to see you again.
Let’s write about us - what sense can we make of the event of our attraction? We are two trans women, and we are in love… what sense can we make of the preciousness of feminine sexuality trans-scribed across infinitely drilled down sense impressions of whose unity we chink just beyond? I think we could only come close to answering by exemplifying, that is, through method—so firstly, what does this mean that we chink beyond the unity of our subjecthood?
Remember that moment I sat in your lap one night and we did a bump of K and you showed me a half second look at pictures of the Andes and you said this is where I’m from? The Andes that we managed to commune with that night were less of a place we weren’t currently at and more of a concept that we could swim within given by the blowing out of time as concurrent multitudes of times, simultaneous occurrences of time, many years happening at the same time, over and over. That coordinates, pins, could be so unmoored in a spatio-temporal freefall felt natural, that it was the progressive plugging into an always existing absolute eternal space in which we have known each other for ten thousand years—that feeling of eternity felt so strong that evening yet it has already been holding us as we’ve wrapped our hands around the world and two point five thousand years of literature and performances and meaningful human pictures, that because of our obsessions we in our individualities plug ourselves into—us as an event and as a singularity are distributed across this alternate world and it is from this jutting out to where linearity cannot obtain that we’ve danced in dark undifferentiated masses, in terrifying neutrality and saltlessness, in the basis for being as a will in willing, in a dermalogical longing that when unable to be stretched out across the South American mountain range, in the everyday and the need to cook dinner and get enough sleep, the glow of it’s eternal newness never dies.
Remember the Warraba Weatherall sculpture we saw at the MCA [InstitutionaLies, 2017/2025], how the globe was held in a craniometer and Indigenous spears held it captive from the outside? How the inside became turned inside outside, the outer folded in, how the reverse of the world calls into questions “the world”? How have we come to know that the Law cannot be and has never been confronted by the languages of alterity given by the Law itself, but that this Law’s own slips and elisions opens a transcendental positivity through which the ideal and the brutally material pierce one another and where what is needed for knowledge is this absolute practice of cheerful secrets beyond what can ever be legislated.
We know then that anything can be the site for philosophy—including falling in love, including trans attraction, including the constantly new sexual event—piercing the hard work (and the hand work) put into thought and the eternity of ideas and the radical contingencies of drives and urges—that we may think and feel and love as a concurrent practice and that writing about it falls through solipsism into something we can only work out on the page—on the page where in some version of good faith we must, in order to have something worth saying, in order to be an example of freedom, we must chink beyond that formal and radical loneliness given by the impenetrable unity of subjecthood into that permeated and pierced spacetimezone by way of the gaps in our words, the membranes of our derma, by dancing and improvisation.
To return to the question - What sense can we make of the event of our attraction? The question betrays the possibility of its possible answer, which cannot be one of sense nor its legislation of what is not sense, but can only be found in the untimely and ill para-virtuality of non-sense. Let’s answer to ourselves dermalogically. It seems that the skin, itself permeable and pierceable, has its own intelligence and desire and makes choices towards its own fulfillment—it has its own improvisatory logic, and by staying just short of pure meaning at every part of this page we may impart rather a method for thought and for dancing.
Over and over, not a mere repetition of resemblances, but only ever the first time again—and again. That I may never get used to you because you will never be a given and you will always be new to me.
Oriane:
What sense can we make of our attraction?
I want to grasp this question first by hand. Maybe because you raise this idea of the dermis, and because hands are experts in that matter. Also because yesterday you mentioned all the words for the way hands act, and all the ways hands have come up in our relationship, the vocabulary of hand, which I find here in what you’ve written.
It is true that the hand is adept at touch, hands are what we once exercised when doing the embodiment practices of Bonnie Bainridge Cohen, in that strange house in Carlton which was comfortable albeit terribly ordinary. Hands can be ordinary as well, go to anyone and you’ll find hands that act the same way, hands that make dinner, hands that find their position before sleep, hands that grab, carry. Go anywhere and it is the same, same, same.
Some are dealt a worse hand than others, some bear more. I know your hands have. But how come at moments when we chink just outside the ordinary do I find in yours room for infinite contemplation ? Why so ? Maybe it is because of this word—chink. It means a narrow opening, one that admits light. And indeed your hands appeared luminous. That night we spread across time, across the Andes. It reminds me of those first days of us. And making our way through the many names of artists written on paper, on your closet. It felt we were stretching our hands out to all of them, an almost-touch.
The Andes stretches from tundra to jungle to desert, it is a road that skirts all these biomes which act in fixed and determinate ways. It is quite literally these fields folding in on themselves as to produce a new thing. I remember this feeling when we were high, that weekend we planned at least a month ahead. Your room appeared the world folded in itself, something so large, like the Andes presently held lightly in our hands. Later after the third shot, you said that having someone to share your love of art by looking at rectangles in museums, was a miracle. Earlier maybe a week and a bit before I had this dream I told you of, your hand polishing dirty gold and silver spoons. The whole dream was delimited with an actual frame, quite literally like a painting. Rectangle on your hands. And here I come to a realization. That if I’ve started by talking of hands it is because 'hand' not necessarily as signifier but as metaphor is that which in this world folded in on itself, builds, writes, and paints. This is what I see in yours. The vocabulary of line is the vocabulary of hand.
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When Mike Parr paints blind, his whole body plays the hand, which disappears behind the trace. Like when grand master Flash places his hand on the disc. The desire to play a hand. And what a desire it is. Even in the exercise of thought, hands attack and tremble, and stretch out in every direction. Drawing something out. This is also what I see looking down at yours, hands that think the desperate machinations of freedom, striving to finger inside which really is, just about, outside. Inside me, Inside you. To me it feels like outside. Narrow openings that just about admit light, fingers gripped in a undifferentiated no thing.
But to return over and over to the question. What sense can we make of our attraction?
Nonsense yes which really is sense intensified. The skin does have an intelligence, and my cells send signals to you like a satellite, like how we talk about philosophy, like how presently we write. It's no wonder that I remember my whole body desperately lighting up like a dynamite wick, senses enervated, the first time I read an interview of yours. By your side in bed. Before having sex. Because these things are immanent. The mind is a muscle after all.
But moreover, what allows every encounter to feel new is that I have found an other. And because we are trans women, but also we are us, that is to say others. We have no fixed standpoint. So in this no-thing, where we’ve already been and danced, we always come on different footing. Never taking an approach as a given. Never coming home to each-other, rather always coming around.