Stone and Flesh

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▲ From Looking for Lenin, Neils Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert (FUEL Publishing, 2017). Photograph by Niels Ack- ermann, taken in Slovyansk, Ukraine, on September 15, 2015.

STONE AND FLESH [1]

Heed my words and you may discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
– Susan Stryker[2]

Today not a single Lenin statue remains standing in Ukraine. There has been no consistency in their handling: they have been variously toppled and left unclaimed; stored away by the authorities; broken up or tampered with beyond recognition; or repossessed by hopeful locals.
– Myroslava Hartmond[3]

these are the sounds of stone &
flesh

“He was here with us to play, re-define
what kind of mess we [were] going through
, because no one was possible. I
keep facing time;
to go and build a decent past?
hidden, discovered”

To bury your face in the ground as if it were your lover
To fly as you eat dirt
To never let go of what you clutch in your hand
To take up all that space
To not get back up when you fall
s c a t t e r e d    ,    stone and     wood, your
eyes rest,        s t i l l  , tugging at your suit
    pining    for movement. Is
    no one  there? I am trying to become an expert    ,  
you   tell me resist mastery.[4]    So
                           it is
            impossible to separate [from you]. T h e b o d y
      is vaster than         pictures      and
p a r t s   ,   alive   ,
     lips      in the emptiness, say: You and I are also
       fictions, and we live in this collective dream.[5]
       Now            become      ,
               the         poet,   my
      house my friend my world my tree my son. I try   to find
   limits, words            &
                   your cold flesh suggests I am only
                                       the edge.

I can barely make out your words: 
No illumination, but feeling around in the dark. I'm talking about discovering the
surface of an interiority with your skin. [6]
Is this the answer? I ask, eyes closed and crawling on the damp soil next to you. We
have no other solution than to lick at being. Suck it, as the sole mode of knowledge and
apprehension.[7] My arm hits your stone body as I open my mouth and put my tongue
to the dirt.

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN DIED IN 1924.
LENINISM WAS BORN BEFORE THE FLESHY LIVING MAN DIED, & LENIN’S BODY
AFTER DEATH BECAME A PIECE OF THE BODY OF LENINISM, A
QUASI[BI]OLOGICAL BODY.

I am another place & the emptiness in your flesh. Legitimate, I age like wine. My death dropped me flat as a square with no peace, nor power, just a crescent and a crown. Are my eyelashes fake? My “face makes a complete impression of a sleeping person, rather than a corpse,”[8] but I am not resting. I can’t decompose like you will, you: just another “anonymous ‘experimental’ body.”[9] Flesh is a murky place. The Lab that creates yours as a passable image & form may be remote, but that is neither here nor there. Preservation is also destruction. Rarely are both accounted for. Canonized & banished,[10] I am “Lenin.” Am I real? you wonder. How much of me is real? What does it mean to be real? As my first embalmer once responded, “I will allow myself not to answer this question.”[11]

THE PRESERVED BODY WAS TRANSPORTED TO THE SIBERIAN CITY OF TYUMEN
TO PROTECT IT FROM NAZI TROOPS DURING WORLD WAR II.
THE JOINTS IN LENIN’S BODY ARE STILL FLEXIBLE.
THE PERFORMANCE NEVER CEASES.

I w a n t t o k n o w w h a t i t w o u l d l o o k l i k e “ t o p r e s e r v e u p h e a v a l ”[12]

The time        is   already over
   I call   and I        worry about
                                 all of
our  inevitable            [horrors]
violations,
  worse?     I only say
    that the     brutal
       desire distinctive   of
                              being both [is]
                     . . .    In other words, there is
                               transformative
                     perpetual vanishing;
                                 flesh,
genitals,                                  flesh
                           a cinematic

                  partial, incomplete,
            living         e n t r a n c e

My God, they cut it all in pieces. To be honest, I don’t really understand what is happening.

I have the head of evil in my garden. I don’t want to talk about it – don’t bother me.

My God, they cut it all in pieces.

“Now I [am] no longer, I have no                     
landscape. [It’s] not important. [I am] of the past,               
with the present and anxious. Imagine:
to be honest,
an old risk. It’s the strong nature
wild plants and vines all over
the monuments here in my garden. The people can
bathe [themselves] like history.
To me , I [am] the statue outdoors.”

How is it to look at yourself? To have a child sit on your head? To become her seat,
her canvas? You are remade in her image – covered in red paint and bird shit,
dirty      and      joyful.
You are surrounded by wildflowers. They grow into you and your stillness.     
You hear my thoughts. I wonder what it is like to               
be  destroyed  remade  melted  painted   
held                                
tucked away  toppled  protected  left alone  all at once.            
Is      t h i s  existence?
Are  you  over  it?      P e o p l e      still  want so  much
from  you & yet:

We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.[13]

CURTAIN CALL








(It’s true. We will simply be people, all of us, as [if] it was only the beginning. I’ll be waiting for these beautiful evenings, distant & unfamiliar, when the future stops standing in its proper place.[14])

  1. Paul B. (Beatriz) Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (Zone Books: New York, 2014), 24.  ↩

  2. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” What Is Gender Nihilism? A Reader, 87-113 (Contagion Press, 2017). Originally published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1994.  ↩

  3. Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert, Looking for Lenin (FUEL Publishing: London, 2017), 13.  ↩

  4. Jack (Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press Books: Durham, 2011), 11.  ↩

  5. Preciado, Pornotopia, 7.  ↩

  6. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (The Feminist Press at CUNY: New York, 2013), 154.  ↩

  7. Ibid., 142  ↩

  8. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005), 138.  ↩

  9. Ibid., 142.  ↩

  10. Ibid., 122.  ↩

  11. Ibid., 127.  ↩

  12. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions: New York, 2013), 20.  ↩

  13. Ibid., 20.  ↩

  14. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Random House: New York, 2017), 11.  ↩

JYOTI ARVEY is a writer, artist and bookseller based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been published in The New Engagement, Chronogram, theEEEL, and The Hummingbird Magazine of the Short Poem, among others.