Death, sex, and thank god -- NOT taxes

Plus a book update

*All art in this essay by Tracey Emin

A year ago, maybe two, Myra told me that I had to go see Our Town. Her high school was putting it on, and a lot of her theater kid friends were in it. 

“Mama, you’ll love it.” she said. 

“You’re gonna cry so hard.” 

She was right. I had never seen Our Town in its entirety because honestly, it looked boring. 

There was just one part that really got me. I’m gonna describe it to you but my hands are too lazy this morning to google the names of the play’s characters. Let’s all agree this is a rock bottom level of laziness and move on together—

So the one lady character who dies gets to revisit one day of her life as a ghost. She is warned by the other ghosts about how hard its gonna be. She can’t understand why it will be so hard. She’s just gonna go watch a normal day of her life – what’s the big deal?  She doesn’t take the warnings seriously. 

Then she gets there. I *think its one of her birthdays. I can’t be googlin’ so I can’t be sure. Slowly, she begins to realize why she was warned. Do you know why? Its because none of the people, not her, or her mama, or the other people on that day had a single clue about how precious every mundane moment or what a miracle each breath they took in their wild and weary bodies was. As a ghost watching - a ghost who no longer had the privilege of a body,  she couldn’t bear that the living didn’t know the miracle in real time. She shouted at them to wake up to it. To look at each other all the way. To see. 

Okay, shoot. Am I gonna do it? Are these fingers gonna reach beyond themselves and goggle in order to share with you her moving soliloquy from this moment? Yes. Yes they are. I just gotta….

(Brief interlude) 

K, here it is. The ghost lady’s name is Emily:

“Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. – I can’t look at everything hard enough. Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me.

Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it – don’t you remember?

But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

Myra was right. She usually is. During this part of the play, I was crying hard. The theater was set up as one of those tiny, black box stages, so everyone around could hear me well enough to fear my snot might get on them. This made me cry harder.

Our full awareness of death helps us fully live. Yet we live in a culture who sweeps it under the rug along with a million other uncomfortable truths. 

Which all reminds me of one of the greatest things I’ve seen lately: Dying for Sex with Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate. Have you watched it yet? I just linked you to the trailer. Its about a 40 year old woman whose cancer diagnosis returns, this time ith a fatal prognosis. She decides to leave her husband, who is her caretaker and will not touch her body sexually,  in order to spend the remainder of her days trying to have an orgasm. 

This show (find it on hulu, and interestingly, Disney plus)  had been on my radar for awhile, so when my pal, Kadi with the best taste texted me that episode six would change my life forever, I wasted no time. 

Like Myra, Kadi was right. Episode six was a woman about to die, touching her closest thing. Moving to its sound. Expressing its rhythm. Lol — with a name like Dying for Sex, it sounds like I’m talking about masturbation. And that would be fun and okay. But I am not. 

I’m talking about what it takes to be alive. I’m talking about how it episode six, of Dying for Sex, Michelle Williams’ character found it. I’m talking about how too few of us are brave enough to go where she went to find out. Im talking about how getting up in the morning, breathing all day and doing a bunch of stuff is not the same thing as living. To live we must be vulnerable. And to be vulnerable we must be brave enough to draw right up close to every oceanic depth inside of us –and sit with the discomfort of what cannot be known with our minds, because it demands to be felt with our bodies. 

I’m talking about how we get tricked or traumatized into believing that vulnerability, this real kind, will kill us, so we do everything to avoid it. But its just the opposite. Not being vulnerable, not doing what we really love or want, or telling the truth about that, makes our whole lives a living death. 

Hell is a zombie-esque performance of humanity based on conformity that we normalize because we hope it will keep us safe. 

It won’t. 

I’m talking about how if you want to be fully alive, the price you must pay is feeling everything. The definition of bliss is a feeling fully felt. Whether that feeling is good or bad. That part doesn’t matter. Don’t credit me for that line tho, cuz I heard it somewhere on the internet ether this past week

Ready for an abrupt segway?

Men fuck to escape death.

Women fuck to fully live.

These are words I wrote years ago, stumbling down the awe-lit streets of San Francisco. They were more musings on what has been a life long theme. They were a truth blooming up in me because I had lived them. Through my divorce. After my divorce. Into the first real love I found as my reborn self. 

More than 12 years ago, I violently extracted myself from my zombie, scripted path, and leaving much carnage in my wake, went searching for my own pulse again.

So when I watched the way Michelle Williams moved in episode six of Dying for Sex – I saw myself and lost myself in its truth. I exploded. A convulsing grief and gratitude tore through my body. As tears poured from my face, my form undulated with the polarity of these two emotions - the heads and tails of recognition; Grief and gratitude, pain and pleasure, Life and death.

Sobs shuddered through me like an orgasm.

There she was. There I was. There we were. 

We don't escape death with sensation + stimulation. We fully live when we look death in the eye, inhale its breath and allow it to expand both our understanding and our senses.

This is where I give you an update on my book, From Chaos, which I have been publishing here, one chapter at a time for paid subscribers.

Have you noticed the chapters ceasing in their distribution? From over here it’s easy to tell myself the story that no one does notice. No one’s reading. Everyone is busy. But even if that’s true, it’s not fair. 

I haven’t been sending out chapters because I’m stuck. I’m stuck in my own experiment of trying to write and distribute a book in real time. Doing so means missing a lot of boxes one’s supposed to check. Like having an editor. Like giving space to the people in the story to feel peace. 

I thought 12+  years would be enough space. But time collapses with age. 

I’m taking a 3-6 month break to write privately - away from publishing chapters online. I want to give the part of my book that is about the way I fucked to face death and feel myself into life again more dedicated time and attention. I confess I’m leaving the part of the book —the part I’ve already written much of and published some of — the part about my family of origin, my marriage and how it fell apart, knowing I haven’t given it the same kind of time and attention. Knowing, that much like the way I lived that time of my life, I was wreckless and impetuous as I wrote. That part of my story is just as deserving of time and attention, perhaps even more so. My hope is that I will be able to come back to those stories another time and tell them in a more cohesive way.

I mean to finish what I started. And I mean to do it here, the way I promised you, my readers, if you’re out there. My stuckness had me questioning how I could do that in a way that felt authentic, because I know myself well enough to know that authenticity is the only gasoline that keeps this engine running sustainably. And this break + shift of focus is that fuel.

I’ll still be here in newsletter form about once a week or so. Just not in book chapter form for a few months. 

Thank you for your willingness to come along for my ever-experimental adventures. 

Thank you for your patience. 

Thank you even more for your support. 

I can’t wait to share what I write with you. 

Tell me how you’re feeling alive these days which may very well be Armageddon, or the New Age. 

xx,

Yan