Striptease

The urge to unveil greater and greater secrets, to expose myself one misdemeanor at a time. Here is a darkened room and a woman hidden in the lack of light. We see her when she chooses to illuminate us. She switches on the light and we see her clothed in many layers. She is swaddled tight in every piece of clothing that she owns. We see the whole package and therefore we see nothing but the outer layer. We wonder about her skin but only fleetingly. Her bones are hidden beneath the surface. The excavation would be laborious.

This is a strange but fascinating striptease. With the light turned up my systematic undressing is available to any casual glance. I leave an invitation to the dance in various venues. My exhibitionist urges see me leafleting the bathroom at the BAFTAs. A writer's festival, a cafe, a bookshop. I slip a note into the kicked and scarred metal grille of a telephone box in London, my own striptease beside the other nudges and winks from various naked, prostrate girls. I drop my notices on a train in the outer suburbs.
I remove the pieces of clothing one by one and when it seems that I am naked, I slip the veil of nakedness from myself like a catsuit and there is more flesh beneath. We will never come to the end of it. I am set to a continuous striptease loop.

There is a scene in a film by Hanneke where a man plays a table tennis machine. The rhythm of his strokes is hypnotic, the hollow clacking of the ping pong ball when he misses. There is a momentary break in the sound of it and it is the pause that we focus on, the relief of a break in what might have been a hypnotic loop of sound.

I think of this as I sit with my computer day by day, a loop of breasts and arseholes and semen and vaginal juices. Sex and sex and sex and sex until flesh itself becomes the disguise that I am hidden behind.

In the Hanneke film the young man glances down from a high window in the building. He glances up once more from a place on the pavement. We are told nothing, but we know that he is imagining the fall.

I glance back at the hundred and something days of sex and sex and sex. I gaze ahead to the empty moments that are left to fill, the evenings when I will climb back into the frame of my high window and turn the light back on and peel off the layers of my nude-suit one by one. My hypnotic rhythm.

I tell you nothing as I am revealed, but still i wonder if perhaps I have revealed it all.