headonist

Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

* * *

Autumn comes as a striptease. And its September 11 at 9:16am and on the East Coast of America at least, the show hasnt quite begun yet: standing on the porch before breakfast and walking home alone at night, maybe you need a light jacket, and youll have the hot tea for a change, but lunchtime is still flip-flops and sunny side of the street. But you know and nature knows whats coming.

And yes yes yes soon enough huge symbolic leaves will plummet out of the ashen sky and the grass will dry out and all the color will sap out of the scene. Nature denudes like clockwork, and boy oh boy you fiend, youll eat it up, ogling ringside. Is it glorious or miserable?

Nature strips while you bulk up. Nature discards and you close down, shut up, cover over, hunker in. You and nature might not be on the same side of this little performance.

But when the season has run through, will Nature be more honest or less? Are we seeing the real nature, skeletal and exhausted? Or is all the frippery of summer just as honest?

See, it seems like Im rambling here, but I had this idea I would write about anonymity. I want to know: who gets hidden when the mask gets worn -- the wearer or the world?

Which is masked -- summer nature or winter nature? More to a point, when I hide my real name here on Suicide Girls, and most of my face, and all telling details, am I more or less free to be myself?

Famous quote by Wilde: Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Well lordy, if the internet and Photoshop havent just taken a bite outta that.

Here and elsewhere, safely twice-removed behind the internet and pseudonyms, I can write as much about sex and politics and religion and so forth as I like -- as long as I dont say, you know, anything too specific (lest I be outted to the world as a man with an interest in naked women).

Im free to describe fucking in neon strobe three-dee detail -- as long as I dont mention specific names (ahem, Julie and Gretchen) or places (say, a certain front porch at 1345 Juniper Street in Bryn Mawr).* That would be rude and dangerous, of course. Moreover, its not Literary: everyone knows that true accounts are only trashy memoirs, whereas the introduction of pseudonyms is the stuff of Art.

So Im free to write but not share with anyone in my other life -- the slightly-less-anonymous world of Facebook and email and publishing. Here I write my beautiful sentences, to no real world effect. Im a sexual Cassandra. Anonymity has rendered me free but impotent.

Still, anonymity aint all a drag. Its bunches fun during Strip Hide and Seek. (I invented that!; Ill explain the rules if you like.) And its the delight of being drunk, in which I dont know myself or what I might do next. And its the delight of getting other people drunk. And its the root of the thrill of sex, when the little death of orgasm allows you, for a moment, to not exist -- only be sensation in space.

I dont have any resolution for the glories / pains of anonymity. Nor can I settle the issue of natures striptease. The ambiguity, of course, is the kink. The fun of striptease is playing along the line of the mask, of wondering which is audience and which is performer.

Roland Barthes famously writes: Striptease - at least Parisian striptease - is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

And that, sure as sugar, brings us back to Rilke: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.


The huge summer has gone by and now were terrified. What happens when the last leaf falls? Ah, but little cavefolk, take heart: the one glorious trick of striptease nature is that new clothes rise from the discarded fragments.



* Pseudonyms have been replaced with real names, to protect the privacy of my characters.