My vision, my love, to you I owe quite simply everything.
Frédéric, my beautiful man-dove,
What a wonderful story! Verging so beautifully on homoerotic sentimentality. Are you, in secret, a novelist? Or merely as fluid as a woman in your erotic torments?
You want to give form to freedom, you say — the abstract idea of freedom? Let me tell you about freedom. Freedom is the body of a woman. The devouring, generating paradox of her body. Every law every aspiration every journey a man takes fails in the face of her body.
The women I know who sell their bodies for cash in this gleaming city are separated from the bourgeois married women by a membrane thinner than a scrotal sack. To wit: by law, any woman who has premarital sex is a prostitute. Our bodies — and by bodies, I mean our sex, our cunts, the sources of our reproductive worth — are held by our legislators at a level just above livestock, a fact I know you tire of me restating. Yes, it’s true, women have and will always provide sex to men for any number of reasons: for food, for clothing, for entertainment, for housing, for a fiction of respectability or a fiction of whore-gasm. The commercial direction of the act, the production of the sex worker as part of the workforce, unveils the tensions and falsehoods embedded inside your precious word and fiction of “freedom.”
Freedom? We need a new fiction that begins with the poor. The hungry. The filthy and the obscene. Not the exhausted bodies that bear the weight of a society’s growth — women who bear children — but women who carry the surplus, the spent seed that adds no number to the population. Women who emerge from crossdressing men. Hermaphrodites and lesbians, nádleehi, lhamana, katoeys, mukhannathun. Look them up, dearest, if I’ve confused you. Bring me Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, Eleanor Rykener, Thomasine Hall. Bring me Joan of Arc. Bring me Albert Cashier and James Barry, Joseph Lobdell and Frances Thompson.
We need a new story of freedom that begins with the body of a woman with neither children nor the cyclops desire of the male penis entering or leaving the hole of her. We need a regendering of colossal scale. A manwoman.
Design that, my love, and you have yourself a kind of freedom.
But let me not leave without giving you a story. The story begins with the image of a naked dead woman whose commerce was sexuality. I have included a postcard — a POSTCARD! Produced from the event, borrowed from my considerable collection.
What event? That season, there was no other in the city, perhaps in the nation. The esteemed editor of the Herald, upon encountering the body of murdered sex worker Helen Jewett, replied that he could scarcely look at it. At it! According to his later report, he slowly began to discover the lineaments of her corpse, “as one would the beauties of a statue of marble.” A statue! Do you see, my dove? If you were here, I would read it to you aloud: “My God,” he exclaimed. “How like a statue!” For not a vein was to be seen. According to him, the body looked as “full-polished as the pure Parian marble.” He is speaking your language! “The perfect figure — the exquisite limbs — the fine face — the full arms — the beautiful bust — all — all surpassing in every respect the Venus de Medicis.”
I give you exhibit A, wherein a dead woman is made eternally beautiful.
Do you know, beloved cousin, how the penny press we know was born on the night of her murder? There is no hotter fuel for consumption than cheap crimes against women and children. And blood.
Did she scream when the hatchet landed, or before? Of all the new accounts, none mentions a scream, or any sound at all. Nor was there any sign of struggle. This tells me that she knew her assailant, likely well, likely intimately. A young man of nineteen, so the story goes. But the details of the actual woman, her body, her life, were subordinated to the drool-worthy matter of the sexual violence, the voluptuousness of her body, half naked and expired.
I wonder what we have set forth into the world. Not the violence, which has always been there, men in love with killing women, but the story of it obliterating all other stories. A sexually unapologetic woman murdered and burned is the fact of it. That she was murdered again, by our consumption of her story, is the unacknowledged truth.
For your statue, cousin, remember those: the fact and the truth. Please keep in mind that woman’s bludgeoned body, and what we did with her. It will keep my rage alive.
I have kept a collection of representations of her. Among them, I do believe Alfred Hoffy’s lithograph is my favorite. You know the way I have designed my bedroom, my clothes, even my bookshelf — all of these were patterned after hers. Did you know that she created her own library inside her room? Books by Lord Byron. She even had a picture of the poet on her wall, and — oh, how you’ll love this — a copy of Leaves of Grass on her bedside table. With passages underlined. This dead woman, who paid so lavishly for the journeys of her cunt, was a literary adventurer. Brilliant. Likely more intelligent and creative than every cocksure narcissistic moron who brought his business her way.
My dearest, I will answer your question. The reason I will not remove the images of this girl and her murder above my bed, the reason I cannot let go of this dead girl or, for that matter, any dead girl, is that she was a writer. In a trunk found in her room, she kept more than one hundred letters, and books, and other papers. Her worktable was littered with pens and ink and excellent writing paper. She wanted — was determined — to say something.
What became of her instead is the creation of an uncontainable story, now merchandised for erotic consumption. The beauty of her green velvet dress was reproduced as if it were an allegory for everything secreted behind velvet curtains throughout this city.
The beauty of her corpse created a hunger. Exquisite. Naked. Dead.
The other reason I cannot let go of this dead girl — this beautiful, sharp, creative girl — is that she knew exactly what to do with her cunt. She employed it as a means of resistance: resistance to reproduction in favor of capital. This was an inspiration, my cousin — this was deserving of worship. Where other people place a cross with an androgyne hanging from it that they pretend is a man — a hilarious icon if you ask me, with its double entendre, its sexualized, baffled, naked body up against some fiction of sin and redemption; could there be a more sadomasochistic image? — I prefer another image: The bare-breasted prostitute. In the long moment before the hatchet hits her skull.
It’s more honest.
Love eternal,
My cousin, my Eros, my confidante,
Your postcard has arrested my sleep, given me a kind of fever. But you knew it would. You are indeed a profound seductress — I am reading the Mary Shelley book and now I have opened the mail and the postcard too. Do you mean to kill me with this strange, erotic, morbid excess? Or just to haunt me? Dead women and monsters brought to life at the hands of a girl… you call images like Medusa to my mind’s eye. You make me want to go back and look to see if we’ve got the story all wrong. You make me want to fashion a colossus that shoots flames from between her legs.
And, my god, how could I have missed the opportunity in front of me: a child of the city! A prostitute! What an incredible turn in my imagination you have engendered. This statue must carry something of the heat and thrust of cities.
Have you read any of the Darwin? A deal’s a deal, my love.
Did you know Darwin married his cousin?