Next Sat Nov 8, Ash and I will be at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop for our event on Abject Expressionism. We’ll read selected passages from our ongoing collaboration (preview a recent entry from me below) as well as our respective books Low and Still Worm. We’ll also chat about what abject expressionism means to us, show you some art, and have a little Q&A. Special guest Alex Reed Wilson will play a noise set to open and close the event. Come!

My friend took me along on a small, private tour of a show called “Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter” at the Jewish Museum in New York. A case near the entrance contained small sculptures and works on paper. A flaccid uncircumcised penis, a grimacing uterus, a giant clitoris pressed into clay like a fossil, piles of cast viscera: they were repulsive. They were abject. They were gorgeous.

At the center of the exhibition sat Passage Dangereux, a series of small rooms enclosed in chain link fencing, like a dog run, filled with old school therapist office furniture that was surrounded by floating chairs, mirrors, and sculptures of rubber, glass, and bone. It was a nightmare of vulnerability.

“Where I do not attack, I do not feel myself alive,” Bourgeois wrote on a sheet of loose leaf paper.

In another room hung Janus Fleuri, a bronze form that mimics a woman’s fleshy, organ-filled pelvis. Its name refers to the Roman god Janus with his dueling heads, keeper of gates, doorways, beginnings and ends. A cunt is a beginning and an ending. A mouth is the twin of the anus. Gates and doorways, body as building or landscape, an enterable entity. The sculpture spun revealing a back the same as its front.

Afterward, the young museum docent invited us out to a cafe where she ordered bottles of wine for the table that each cost more than I earned in a week as an adjunct professor. I tried to enjoy myself, but the whole time, I was terrified I’d be asked to split the bill.

Today I strap myself to abjection in romance. A drives my body to an edge.

“All day, I thought about fucking you,” A tells me. He describes his daydream simply, with formal precision. Then his tongue is in my mouth. My pants come off. I pull up his shirt and press against him. The shirt bunches under his armpits. My legs open in his hand. It happens just as he imagined. He told me the truth. The result was satisfaction.

I used to delude myself that I was communicating telepathically with my lovers. I thought I could transmit something to them with my body. If I was a gate, a doorway, an enterable entity, my own Janus Fleuri spinning from the ceiling in the bedroom, I could have intimacy. I didn’t know that physical abjection was insufficient. I had to go further. With A, I experiment with vulnerability while clothed, verbal disclosure, telling him what I think and feel. It is sometimes a nightmare, but it’s the only way to get what I want. He knows this. I am his apprentice.

A carved jack-o-lantern burns on the porch with a wincing visage—holes in a gutted vessel abjected in the spirit of celebration.