IVORY IN PRIVATE
To describe ivory is to employ negative philosophy, to describe facticity’s purity only in terms of what fact it is not. The ivory buzzes formlessly yet can be harnessed as a type of anchor to be used for reentry into the facticity of material life after undergoing, what has been with him the
not-so-rare sublimity of entering the brutalizing splendor of self loss. “I think,” I whisper though seismic trembling, “I think…” and trail off. My tongue can’t muscle the the acrobatics of words. Not here. This is an actual space and it can’t exist without him.
Ivory as a charge belongs to the Virgos, the Tauruses. It is the stability of the four in tarot: the four of wands, the four of pentacles, the four of cups, the four of swords. This charge sustains always, with or without him, which is to say, at any given time, there are inuring ribbons of ivory tied under my breasts and around my torso, ribbons composing my wrists, ribbons devising my waist, a charged ivory tusk mining my cunt void, ribbons inventing the fattest part of my thighs, a ribbon constituting each ankle. Since it is ivory light, akin to white, a concentration of all colors, it has been difficult for it to reveal itself to me because of the fact that its long, steady note is first sung when one is conceived. We are born hearing it. Its pitch will warble only under extreme duress. I want to say that the ivory charge ceased when I entered the void with him but that thought is too terrifying to accept. Before writing that, I asked myself, does the ivory pitch cease after death? In other words, will the world go on without me? Or, perhaps the better question is: how much of that charge is autonomous within me and how much of it is sourced in the elusive
mirror of the outside world I watch like a flesh TV? What of this will be teased apart and sunder when I die? Instead of concerning myself with unanswerable questions, I’m trying to teach myself to unearth that charge when I am in the void, to use it as a sort of mountain climber’s
rope to throw through that spacious chasm and attach to material facticity to pull me back. “Ivy, come back to the room.”