I have been searching all my life for a woman. Not a lover, a partner or a spouse to bear my children. I have had all of these things, and cared for them dearly. But they were not the woman. They were not what I sought.
I go through them like books. They come to my studio, they undress, I take pictures. They dress, I pay them, they leave. Some of them come back. Many have become my friends. None of them are the woman.
I imagine someone might ask me “why haven’t you given up?”. The question never troubles me. Life is inconceivable without the search. I don’t mean this in a frightening way. It’s as matter of fact as the sky. If one day, I woke up to find the sky had flown away, I might question my search for the woman. Until then, I will look for her.
It hurts sometimes. My neck aches. My shoulder cramp. My eyes bleed. I have had to train my body for the hunt. I have become an expert huntsman, master of the bow and arrow. I have left a trail of cadavers and corpses behind me. But I have not found her.
I begin to wonder if I will never find her.
A young woman comes in. Confident, shy, it makes no difference. Sometimes I know she is not the one. Othertimes, I suspect she might be. Something in her eyes. Her hair. The way she dresses. The curve of her hips. Her neck. Her breasts. Her thighs. The way she shapes her pubic hair. She stands before me, naked, and I make art of her. And somewhere, there, I lose her.
She becomes a body. Skin and muscle, stretched over bone. Sagging flesh. Withered lips. Cracked, yellow teeth. Thinning hair. Strange, purple bulges. Too boyish. Too young. Too inexperienced. Too old. Too plain. Too defiant. Too many tattoos. Bad tattoos. Good tattoos in bad places. Bad taste. Bad smells. Bad manners. Wonky breasts. Symmetrical breasts. Ugly nipples. A hair that should have been plucked. The spell is ruined.
A shame. So many of these women walk into my studio, many of them so close to the sublime I can taste it. I can feel it. I can hear it in the air, rippling fractals and geometries against the walls. Angels start to sing. I sense God’s presence. My spirit lifts. Hers does too. We fly, dancing in the aether, beyond time, beyond space, beyond love, beyond loss. Light unfolds. I understand the visions of the great mystics, and humble myself before the divine. God is a woman, or at least wears the beauty of one. That much I know. And then she is gone.
I smile, and pretend nothing has happened. I used to hide my disappointment. Then I learned to conceal it. Now I let it all hang out. I have a reputation, which stands in for me. I can be me, scratching away in the human dirt for gold, and they can use me as they like.
My camera takes pictures. They tell me there is beauty in them. I see it, sometimes. More often than not, I see what could have been. Good work. Lacking spirit, but good enough for businessmen and women to pay for. What they see must give them something.
We live a good life, me and my wife. She understands me, mostly. What I lack in my capacity to satisfy her, I make up for in my capacity to amuse her. She tells me I am mad. Occasionally she tells me she likes something I have done. Mostly she gets on with her life.
They say madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think whoever said that was mad. To me, life is the simplest thing in the world. I’m looking for something, and I will continue looking for it until I either find it or no longer wish to look for it. The rest are details to be figured out.
Sometimes I get so close. Her breasts. Her vulva. Her eyes. Her ass. You never really know a woman until you’ve stared deep into her ass. Wondered at that strange orrifice of evolution, that holy accident, that membrane, that little sponge of muscle and skin which separates beauty from the animal. I think of it as “The Cistern Chapel” sometimes, and laugh out loud to myself. It makes some girls self conscious. Others it makes lucid.
They are strange and delicate creatures, women. Childish, really. For all their affectations and pretentions to beauty, to divinity, to maturity, they are children. I see it when they are open, naked before me, at their most exposed. The veil slips. The most sophisticated only let it down for a moment, but I see it. Noone can hide.
They are not what they pretend to be. They are children. They do not understand beauty. They do not understand God. Such matters are trivial affairs for them, pantomimes, games of dress-up and make-believe. They put on, put up, put out, and leave, all in the breath of a cosmic tide. And they are gone. Forever. Unperturbed.
I envy the homosexuals. They have found what they were looking for. They do not need to search for the woman in woman. They see her, they find her, they play her. But I, I who am condemned to search for her forever, I will seek her. I will seek her.
What an outrageously exquisite read, poetry at it's purest and a true work of Art. Simply delicious, magnificent - I love it.