[Synthesis of the Naked Body] a short story

Synthesis of the Naked Body

Nothing becomes unless it holds an underlining substance, marvel. A story that holds no moral, a novel with no plot; all predicates itself, its being and becoming on the subsidy of exhumation.

This occurs to me after I encounter by incidence a woman who comes simply to gratify her hunger. I dream then, dream instantly, fall back onto a solid cloud and take form of it.

-but even in this enchanted age, when we know the cruelties of love, it is sought as the darkness that conceals a hideous imp awaiting pounce. The temporary derangement of deep abysmal burrowing, I take to, without a moment's doubt, the bottom holds the hoard of impalement.

Her name was Alexie.

She has an inherent tan to her skin, a texture of exotic tint, her eyes were that of the most feminine feline, dark and haunting, piercing even, as though they could know sadness and glee interchangeable in one bat of the eye to the next. Her smile one must admit is a disarming one, becalming even the most raging sea. I could not recollect nor reckon in that moment, as I could not remember anything, as to when the last time a smile possessed me into reverie.

Who was this quintessential being of feminine being? Where had she derived and who was the man calm at rest every night who held her tightly?

She became the muse to a day that was museless, scarce and snowy and this man who spoke for her had suddenly become my arch nemesis who I'd gladly skin alive to be in his place next to her.

This is the subversive action, the opiate inhalation, laudanum ingestion, irrational deafness upon deft monotones, the laudatory monograph features upon the tongue ring for oral stimulus. The turn and smile as she walks away says that she too has taken on the rhythm of mystery, of curious arousal. The trial and error of which I desire to embark is the same odyssey undertaken by Miller and Nin, by Abelard and Heloise, a pretentious coitus interruptus upon the curvature of her spine.

Let it be known that this world is the womb and I, a fetus that must grow and develop gradually, consistently, else be engirdled in calcification as the lithopedian. Gladly I will surrender my growth in the Euclidean for the growth upon her flesh. Let it be known that I will rise upon her as the braille that will rise when first my fingertips sweeps against her skin as the sprinkle to the rising tide. Let it be known that I am another phalanges upon her, a parasitic twin with whom nourishes from the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, the sinuses of what she is to the dream. And of this dream, the unparalleled, asymmetric, askew, malformed, abstruse and obtuse meridian, she flutters with the black canaries into a desolate, glowing winter night where the trees lean wearily in their decrepit condemnation, their branches chafing broken sonnets, fallen hymns from bygone song. Therein obsession is a delirium of transitory genius, a beggar quoted by no one upon the abandoned and poverty-stricken earth. Let this dream relapse, reenact itself in a broken language, a cipher, trick of mind and light, a polyp in the fascia only removed upon the full step from this life. Let translation between she and I coexist with a vast electricity, until such times the lights burn bright, then out and all that is left is the synthesis of our naked body.

Dontrell Lovet't

[The Seduction of Modigliani]

In a syphilitic night, where clouds erode the sky and opens it in a French fashion, nothing much is left to seize other than the thought. The stillness is a remnant of the erosion, all are temporarily dead to the world, or temporarily dying at the spearhead of coitus; in continuum, coitus is the formula that expressed the finite of the body, the gesture of the painter to imitate.

In every epoch, there is one who is determined to attain that prime existence of wander; it is in that, where he detaches himself from any culture, brings limit to that culture and attribute to its eventual decay, whilst still holding on to his forbearance as an heirloom. This brings us to the numbered days of Amedeo Modigliani, the conundrum of Leghorn devoured by the lights of Paris. An artist who immortalized Rapheal, it was in the language of art expression itself that gave outrage to the being of Modiglianni.

Rapheal divided mankind into three genres; those who suffer helplessly, those that dream confusedly and those that are entranced by supernatural things; but there is another, a fourth I believe, and that is the one who scours the dream only to squander it. Descartes was unknown to Modigliani and thus art was not the only that needed to be when all is forgotten and discarded for its sake. And on his death bed, he still proclaimed in the words "Cara, Cara Italia," his love for Italy and its entirety in his heart. Though  he left Italy, he was never a motherless child or one illegitimately concealed.

To live amongst the likes of Jacob, of Picasso, to survive the fledgling flourish of Parisienne aura, Modigliani arrived with Italy inside of him as a woman who carries the whole of the world within her. It was of the most pristine, the most Florentine Italy that the Italian-Jewish painter represented, the Venician Republic before it had been plundered and fallen under his fellow Italian countryman Napoleon in 1797, after one thousand years of independence. It was not the Italy brought by Chirico, nurtured by Greek myth and German philosophy, it was a portraiture of his own reflection.

The cubist were intent, driven to reduce the human and its form to a simple structure. When in all regards art was accumulated in Paris, its accumulation meant the burial of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, of Russia. When the artist arrived in Paris, they soon became expatriots with no true nation of origin, for it was buried in them long before their arrival. It is in the portrait of Lunia Czechowska that Modigliani makes an endeavor to paint the way he breathes, resurrect and save his nationalism in the Levant, picturesque display in the form of the woman.

It is in woman that Modigliani expresses his anti-Descartes, anti-cubists forum. It is the symmetry of woman that seduces man one moment and renders him powerless the next. To indulge in the cubists notion that aimed to distort the human, in lieu the woman, would pull Modigliani not from his scouring of the dream but from his native Italy, which to him was the woman all together. The woman wasn't the vice it was for Picasso, Rodin, Simenon and Miller, it wasn't the vice alcohol and drugs were for him; woman was the means to his end, the art that would become an obsession, a harbinger behind their nude bodies, his eventual decay.

As poets of the 18th and 19th centuries demand much of the readers, Modigliani demanded nothing of the one who took into their eyes his caricatures but demanded more of himself. His posthumous fame, which came at the cost of his self-destruction and the self-murder of his wife and artist Jeanne Hebuterne, who threw herself from a fifth floor window from the grief of Amedeo's passing, taking the life of their unborn child with her. The stylist harmony in which he approached the female body, capturing in large part the seduction and charm that has long made men captives in their own creation, came with the cost it would for the old man who saves a city and in turn, is resented for it.

` Everything was deliberate in the work of Modigliani, even that of his own self-destruction. The incidence of woman becoming on his canvas or be it the coincidence of the much admired 1906 death of Paul Cezanne that coincides with the year Modigliani arrived in Paris, the true subject, the naked body, never eluded him. He was a born portrait-painter and what he saw in flesh was all the deliberation he took upon his gesture to recreate it as best any man who is a devout student of the female form could ever, or will ever again.

It was the naked form of the world that Modigliani wanted to truly capture, a world that no one man can ever fully see for himself, but borrow visions that sketches the world out into display. The nakedness of woman before his eyes gave Modigliani that complete vision of the world, authenticity, a rationality so painful he took to alcohol and drug abuse to self-medicate and dilute the weight of it all and if given the chance to breath again, to be resurrected, I do believe he would again inject the opiate of woman, the scent of her skin, the texture of her light and being, and self-destruct all over again.

In the nights, during the long walks deep in the winter of Madison, along Lake Menona, I visualize the portraits of Modigliani, a man after my own, who knew he owed the world a price and dealt with it best the way he could to pay it in full. The chaste brilliance that has become the memory of Modigliani itself is the stigma of the woman of then, the woman of now, that in their very birth, with their very becoming, is the homunculus of the world that unvarying demands in cruelty, if not in subtlety.

-Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]